How can I programmatically test an HTTP connection?

Question

Using Java, how can I test that a URL is contactable, and returns a valid response?

http://stackoverflow.com/about 

Answer 1

The solution as a unit test:

public void testURL() throws Exception {     String strUrl = "http://stackoverflow.com/about";      try {         URL url = new URL(strUrl);         HttpURLConnection urlConn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();         urlConn.connect();          assertEquals(HttpURLConnection.HTTP_OK, urlConn.getResponseCode());     } catch (IOException e) {         System.err.println("Error creating HTTP connection");         e.printStackTrace();         throw e;     } }