Use HTTPClient or HttpUrlConnection? [closed]

Question

We're implementing a REST client on JRE 1.4.

Seems two good options for a client REST framework are HttpClient and HttpUrlConnection.

Is there a reason to use HttpClient over the JRE's HttpUrlConnection?

Answer 1

I would recommend Jakarta Commons HTTP Client over java.net.HttpUrlConnection as it is more mature and has a richer feature set. For example you can ask it to set up multi-threaded connection pool (see MultiThreadedHttpConnectionManager), and it has full support for all the HTTP methods (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, OPTIONS, TRACE).

Answer 2

I'll give you a single, concrete reason to favour Apache's HTTPClient over the JDK implementation: The JDK's HttpUrlConnection doesn't support timeouts*, Apache's HTTPClient does.

Applications should always have the ability to set timeouts when calling into other systems (databases, remote services, your own server backend, ...).

* This was fixed in Java 1.5; Java 1.5 and higher support timeouts in HttpUrlConnection.