Rest Client

[Joice Jose]

I am trying to make a client for an existing RESTful webservice with method signature: String serviceMethod(String).

It will be great if I get some idea about the Rest client.

Thanks
Joice

[William Brogden]

One virtue of RESTful web services is that clients can be very simple and you dont need any special toolkit.

Once you have got the correct URL and HTTP method to address the service you can create a HttpURLConnection to make the request and get the response. See the JavaDocs in the java.net package.

One important point: if your URL starts with "http://" then the URL openConnection returns a HttpURLConnection - a subclass of URLConnection so you need to look at the JavaDocs for both. Setting the request method to "GET" or "POST" uses an HttpURLConnection method.

You might also search for "HttpURLConnection tutorial."

Bill

[Joice Jose]

Thank you Bill.

I tried to create the connection as:

URL myURL = new URL("http://localhost/ats/rest/MyService/getData");//MyService is service and getData is method
HttpURLConnection myConnection = (HttpURLConnection) myURL.openConnection();

But it ended up with a java.io.IOException: Server returned HTTP response code: 500

Joice

[William Brogden]

Looking in the HttpURLConnection javadocs we see that a response code of 500 means "HTTP Internal Server Error" - its time to look at the server side logs for more explanation.

From your initial post I thought you were talking about an existing service created by somebody else, now I see you are addressing it as localhost. How was this service created?

Bill