This is an old question (2008) so there are many more options now than there were then:
UPDATES (projects still active in 2020):
A caveat on picking HTTP/REST clients. Make sure to check what your framework stack is using for an HTTP client, how it does threading, and ideally use the same client if it offers one. That is if your using something like Vert.x or Play you may want to try to use its backing client to participate in whatever bus or reactor loop the framework provides... otherwise be prepared for possibly interesting threading issues.
As I mentioned in this thread I tend to use Jersey which implements JAX-RS and comes with a nice REST client. The nice thing is if you implement your RESTful resources using JAX-RS then the Jersey client can reuse the entity providers such as for JAXB/XML/JSON/Atom and so forth - so you can reuse the same objects on the server side as you use on the client side unit test.
For example here is a unit test case from the Apache Camel project which looks up XML payloads from a RESTful resource (using the JAXB object Endpoints). The resource(uri) method is defined in this base class which just uses the Jersey client API.
e.g.
clientConfig = new DefaultClientConfig();
client = Client.create(clientConfig);
resource = client.resource("http://localhost:8080");
// lets get the XML as a String
String text = resource("foo").accept("application/xml").get(String.class);
BTW I hope that future version of JAX-RS add a nice client side API along the lines of the one in Jersey
You can use the standard Java SE APIs:
private void updateCustomer(Customer customer) {
try {
URL url = new URL("http://www.example.com/customers");
HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
connection.setDoOutput(true);
connection.setInstanceFollowRedirects(false);
connection.setRequestMethod("PUT");
connection.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "application/xml");
OutputStream os = connection.getOutputStream();
jaxbContext.createMarshaller().marshal(customer, os);
os.flush();
connection.getResponseCode();
connection.disconnect();
} catch(Exception e) {
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
}
Or you can use the REST client APIs provided by JAX-RS implementations such as Jersey. These APIs are easier to use, but require additional jars on your class path.
WebResource resource = client.resource("http://www.example.com/customers");
ClientResponse response = resource.type("application/xml");).put(ClientResponse.class, "<customer>...</customer.");
System.out.println(response);
For more information see:
If you only wish to invoke a REST service and parse the response you can try out Rest Assured
// Make a GET request to "/lotto"
String json = get("/lotto").asString()
// Parse the JSON response
List<String> winnderIds = with(json).get("lotto.winners.winnerId");
// Make a POST request to "/shopping"
String xml = post("/shopping").andReturn().body().asString()
// Parse the XML
Node category = with(xml).get("shopping.category[0]");
You can also check Restlet which has full client-side capabilities, more REST oriented that lower-level libraries such as HttpURLConnection or Apache HTTP Client (which we can leverage as connectors).
Best regards, Jerome Louvel
You could try Rapa. Let us know your feedback about the same. And feel free to log issues or expected features.
I'd like to point out 2 more options:
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