Last updated on 2019-10-30
Working with web services has become standard practice today, and it always felt strange to me how much work it took me to call one. I was doing it wrong :-). I found the Unirest library, and my life has been happy ever since.
To show how simple it is, I wrote a short program that queries the StackExchange API for questions in the StackOverflow site:
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| package com.vainolo.examples.javahttpapiclient; | |
| import com.mashape.unirest.http.HttpResponse; | |
| import com.mashape.unirest.http.JsonNode; | |
| import com.mashape.unirest.http.Unirest; | |
| public class JavaHTTPAPIClient { | |
| public void getQuestionsUsingUnirest() throws Exception { | |
| HttpResponse<JsonNode> response = Unirest.get("https://api.stackexchange.com/2.2/questions"). | |
| header("accept", "application/json"). | |
| queryString("order","desc"). | |
| queryString("sort", "creation"). | |
| queryString("filter", "default"). | |
| queryString("site", "stackoverflow"). | |
| asJson(); | |
| System.out.println(response.getBody().getObject().toString(2)); | |
| } | |
| public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception { | |
| JavaHTTPAPIClient client = new JavaHTTPAPIClient(); | |
| client.getQuestionsUsingUnirest(); | |
| } | |
| } |
This call invokes a GET request to https://api.stackexchange.com/2.2/questions that accepts JSON, including transforming the response to a JSON object that can be easily used later.
Pretty cool, uh? The world is finally going forward.
You can find this example in my examples repository. Enjoy
Hi, Can I use XML instead of Json? What are the changes required if I use xml?
Don’t think so. API is here: http://javadox.com/com.mashape.unirest/unirest-java/1.4.5/com/mashape/unirest/request/GetRequest.html