Http Post in JAVA

Question

I have not worked with HTTP post/get before, my up coming project in my office is based on http post/get in java. Its basically client - server based application. the client will post some info and I need to get that info and process the string and vice-verse. this project has to be developed on J2SE. You can assume this some thing like a JMS queue message processing stuff. I googled for the info but most of the information was for web application, mine should work like a message queue. Can someone explain me how to do this or point me where I can get some useful info.

Thanks Arun

Answer 1

Well, if you don't need to specifically use strict HTTP, and you need to just use Java SE (and not Java EE, which rules out Servlets, JSPs, JMS, etc), then you need to probably investigate ServerSocket and Socket classes.

Server

Your server would need to listen on a TCP port (say, port 8080) - usually you would pick a port number between 1025 and 65,535, however if you are attempting to use an already defined service that has a default port, then use that. Note however, that on unix, in order to listen on any port below 1024, I believe you need to be root. Traditionally, port 80 is used for HTTP.

To listen on this port, you would need something like this in your code:

ServerSocket srvSocket = new ServerSocket(8080);
Socket socket = srvSocket.accept();

This pretty much the most basic code that would cause your application to wait until something connected to port 8080. Once connected, you could obtain both an InputStream and OutputStream for your connected client, by interrogating the returned socket object, allowing you to read content from the client, and inserting these requests in a queue. This queue could be then processed by some other Thread.

Client

In order for your client to connect to the server, you would need to use something based on the following example:

Socket connection = new Socket("server.domain.com", 8080);
OutputStream output = connection.getOutputStream();

You would then write your request to the server into the OutputStream (and read from the InputStream returned from getInputStream() if you expected a response)

The code supplied is pretty basic, but it should give you a rough idea of how to proceed. You can even use this method if you wanted to use real HTTP, however it might be a better idea to use some premade library if that was the case (although its probable that you're not going to require all functionality defined in the HTTP spec itself).

Anyway, I hope that provides you a good starting point from which to build.