More Groovy-based Simple HTTP Clients

In my previous blog post, I briefly wrote about the use of Groovy, Groovy's GDK String, and the Java-provided URL class to write simple HTTP/REST clients. In this post, I look at how use of the URLConnection returned from a call to URL.openConnection() can be used to gain even more details about the HTTP connection.

The URLConnection class and its child HttpURLConnection class provide many useful methods for accessing details regarding a HTTP connection. These are easily obtained from a call to URL.openConnection(). This is demonstrated in the next Groovy code listing.

#!/usr/bin/env groovy
def NEW_LINE = System.getProperty("line.separator")
if (args.length < 1)
{
   println "Enter a URL as an argument."
   System.exit(-1)
}
def address = args[0]
def urlInfo = address.toURL()
println "URL: ${address}${NEW_LINE}"
println "Host/Port: ${urlInfo.host}/${urlInfo.port}${NEW_LINE}"
println "Protocol: ${urlInfo.protocol}${NEW_LINE}"

def connection = urlInfo.openConnection()
println "Connection Type: ${connection.class}"
println "Content Type: ${connection.contentType}"
println "Response Code/Message: ${connection.responseCode} / ${connection.responseMessage}"
println "Request Method: ${connection.requestMethod}"
println "Date: ${connection.date}"
println "Last-Modified: ${connection.lastModified}"
println "Content Length: ${connection.contentLength}"

The above code leads to output like that shown in the following screen snapshot where I run the script against three URLs I often hit from my web browser: http://www.javaworld.com/, http://java.net/, and http://www.oracle.com/technology/index.html.



The response code and message are included in the output shown in the above screen snapshot. In all three cases, the response code and message are 200 and OK respectively. The content length of -1 is the value provided by the getContentLength method when (according to the Javadoc) "content length is not known."

In the example above, I used the convenience methods provided for "certain header fields [that] are accessed frequently" (see URLConnection Javadoc description). Because many more header fields are included in responses, it can be useful to find out what these are and see their values. This is demonstrated in the next code sample.

#!/usr/bin/env groovy
def NEW_LINE = System.getProperty("line.separator")
if (args.length < 1)
{
   println "Enter a URL as an argument."
   System.exit(-1)
}
def address = args[0]
def urlInfo = address.toURL()
println "===================================================================="
println "====== HEADER FIELDS FOR URL ${address}"
println "===================================================================="
def connection = urlInfo.openConnection()
headerFields = connection.getHeaderFields()
headerFields.each {println it}

The simple Groovy script above uses the GDK Map.each method that acts on closures and prints out the field values for each header field. The output from running this script against the same three URLs as before is shown next.



This output shows that there are some differences in the fields returned by each of the three URLs in response to the implicit GET request.

The combination of Groovy, Groovy GDK, URL, and HttpURLConnection make it easy to generate a quick and dirty HTTP client. This can be useful in testing HTTP-exposed services including HTTP-based REST services.