Jakarta Commons Cookbook

Chapter 11. HTTP and WebDAV

Introduction

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is ubiquitous; this protocol is at the core of important technologies such as the World Wide Web (WWW), the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), XML databases, content management systems, WebDAV, and, most importantly, iTunes. Much of the world’s business is accomplished over HTTP in some form or another, and if this protocol were to suddenly vanish, a sizable portion of the world economy would vanish with it. Given this ubiquity, it is likely that you’ve had occasion to write a Java program that needed to fetch a web page or interact with a servlet or CGI script. While the J2SE contains some rudimentary tools to communicate via HTTP, the feature set of URLConnection is somewhat limited. This chapter introduces Jakarta HttpClient, a set of utilities that simplifies the task of retrieving and sending information over HTTP.

Jakarta HttpClient grew up in the Jakarta Commons, and until April 2004 it was a Commons project. It has only recently graduated to a full Jakarta project, and it is still visible as a part of the Jakarta Commons subproject. This chapter refers to HttpClient as Jakarta HttpClient, but you should be aware that most of the documentation and support still refer to the project as Jakarta Commons HttpClient until the project has successfully migrated out of the Jakarta Commons.