Skip to content

Calling a Web API from Java using Unirest

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:


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&quot;).
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

Published inProgramming

2 Comments

  1. Deen Dayal Singh Deen Dayal Singh

    Hi, Can I use XML instead of Json? What are the changes required if I use xml?

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.