prob with Jakarta HttpClient & HostConfiguration

[Greg A Watson]

I had a method which opens up http connections to URLs outside our DMZ, and to hide the implementation details of our firewall I make the connection via a proxy. I've previously used the java.net.HttpURLConnection class, and specified a proxy by setting the httpProxy, httpProxy as system properties. The code to open the connection itself was fairly straightforward ('url' is a java.net.URL object);

HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();

However...another application has deployed into the same JVM where my application lives, and due to co-existence issues (insert long story here) I can no longer set these properties in the JVM. To try to just set the proxy on a connection by connection basis, I've changed my app code to use the Jakarta Commons project; I'm using the HttpClient class to create the connection, and then a HostConfiguration object to set the proxy details;

HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
PostMethod postMethod = new PostMethod(url.toString());
// sets various headers
RequestEntity re = new StringRequestEntity(data);
postMethod.setRequestEntity(re);
HostConfiguration hostConfig = new HostConfiguration();

// the 'proxy' object holds the server name and port
hostConfig.setProxy(proxy.getProxyServer(), proxy.getProxyPort());
client.setHostConfiguration(hostConfig);

// do the send
int status = client.executeMethod(postMethod);

The proxy server/port are identical to the one I used before (when using HttpURLConnection, but I now get the following error from my server code when I tried to do the send;

org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodDirector  I/O exception (java.net.SocketException) caught when processing request: Operation timed out: connect:could be due to invalid address
org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodDirector  Retrying request

Any help much appreciated,

Thanks, Greg