Classes and interfaces supporting the client side of the HTTP protocol.

The HTTP Client component supports the client-side of RFC 1945 (HTTP/1.0) and RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1), several related specifications (RFC 2109 (Cookies), RFC 2617 (HTTP Authentication), etc.), and provides a framework by which new request types (methods) or HTTP extensions can can be easily created or supported.

The basis for the abstraction is provided by three types:

{@link org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpConnection}

represents a network connection to some HTTP host.

{@link org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethod}

represents a request to be made over some {@link org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpConnection} and contains the server's response.

{@link org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpState}

contains the HTTP attributes that may persist from request to request, such as cookies and authentication credentials.

and several simple bean-style classes:

{@link org.apache.commons.httpclient.Cookie}

represents HTTP cookie.

{@link org.apache.commons.httpclient.Credentials}

an interface representing a set of authentication credentials.

{@link org.apache.commons.httpclient.Header}

represents an HTTP request or response header.

{@link org.apache.commons.httpclient.HeaderElement}

represents a single element of a multi-part header.

{@link org.apache.commons.httpclient.UsernamePasswordCredentials}

a username and password pair.

{@link org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient} provides a simple "user-agent" implementation that will suffice for many applications, but whose use is not required.

HTTP Client also provides several utilities that may be useful when extending the framework:

{@link org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodBase}

an abstract base implementation of HttpMethod, which may be extended to create new method types or to support additional protocol HTTP features.

{@link org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpStatus}

an enumeration of HttpStatus codes.

{@link org.apache.commons.httpclient.RequestOutputStream}

an {@link java.io.OutputStream} wrapper supporting the "chunked" transfer encoding.

{@link org.apache.commons.httpclient.ResponseInputStream}

an {@link java.io.InputStream} wrapper supporting the "chunked" transfer encoding.

{@link org.apache.commons.httpclient.URIUtil}

provides utilities for encoding and decoding URI's in the %HH format.