Java-based console app as HTTP client

So here is "Ye another one http client" 🐱 that I created for personal use as practice and just to have own tool to test HTTP requests not to download CURL or HTTpie 🐱.

Source code: https://github.com/ahndmal/http-client-java-cli/

JCurl (very hard to create name 🐱)

So this is the console app in Java to receive some arguments and perform HTTP / Socket requests to the passed web host as an URI. Here Java 11 HTTP client is used as a core. To perform more requests without blocking, async reactive processing of requests is used

// client
 HttpClient client = HttpClient.newBuilder()
      .version(HttpClient.Version.HTTP_2)
      .build();

It is a Native and JDK based HTTP client. To build the app as a native executible, we use GraalVM (https://www.graalvm.org/).

Gradle GraalVM plugin

As a build tool we use Gradle and Gradle GraalVM plugin (https://graalvm.github.io/native-build-tools/latest/gradle-plugin.html) that is flexible and fast to build (relatively 🐱) due to cahing.

graalvmNative {
    binaries {
        named("main") {
            javaLauncher.set(javaToolchains.launcherFor {
                languageVersion.set(JavaLanguageVersion.of(19))
            })
            mainClass.set("com.andmal.Main")
            verbose.set(true)
        }
    }
}

Build manually

To build the app as a JAR file:

gradlew build

Then we can run it as usual JAR file with JRE.

Build as native executable:

./gradlew nativeCompile

Run

1. As Java

  java -jar build/libs/http-client-java-cli-19.jar --url http://example.com --method GET

1. As CLI app

    jcurl --url http://example.com --method GET

So the signature is:

jcurl [arguments]

Arguments

request URI:

  --url 

Method (GET / POST / PUT / DELETE / HEAD)

 --method 

Authorization:

 --auth 

or

 -A 

as 'USER:PASSWORD'. e.g.

 --auth admin:admin 

Headers:

 --headers 

request Headers in format of:

 key:value, key2:value2 

query parameters

 --query 

for the request. will be passed as

 ?query= 

Examples

GET

    jcurl --url http://example.com --method GET

POST

    jcurl --url http://example.com --method POST --body '{"name": "Vasyl"}' --headers 'Content-Type: application/json'