how to login to a website through java?

Question

I have tried several ways to login to a website through java. I have used watij, HTMLunit etc. but due to not so familiar with any of these, I am not able to login successfully.

Can anyone tell me in detail how to login through java

To be more specific, I want to login to the ORKUT and want the pagesource of the page that comes after login.

Answer 1

The answer depends on how the website attempts to authenticate you:

• Do you have to set a username and password in the HTTP headers (basic auth)?
• Or do you have to fill out and submit a form containing the username and password?

For either I would recommend commons-httpclient, although the latter screen-scraping approach is always messy to do programatically.

For basic authentication, take a look at httpclient's Authentication Guide.

For forms authentication, you'll need to check the HTML source of the page to understand

• The URL the form is submitted to
• What the names of the parameters to submit are

For help on how to submit a form in httpclient, take a look at the documentation on the POST method.

The httpclient site also contains a basic tutorial.