Wicked Cool Java

Post Haste: Using HttpClient to Post Forms to HTTP Servers

Java developers commonly write applications that connect to a website to retrieve a resource from a URL. The data might be HTML, XML (as in Chapter 3), a standard text file, an image, or any other type of content. Perhaps the data will be incorporated into a Swing GUI or placed into a dynamically generated web page. In other cases the program further processes the data in some other way. Long ago, the core Java API provided a convenient way to make simple web requests and read the data as a stream. The java.net.URL class can make a request and read data from the HTTP response, ...