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java httpServer Post request work

I'm start learning java programming, and I want make a simple server application. I read about com.sun.net.httpserver.HttpServer and find a good example on this link: https://github.com/imetaxas/score-board-httpserver-corejava.
I understand how to do Get-request in url, but I don't know how POST works. I think it must be sent a form or data on the server.
I attach the link of project, which I'm learning, in readme the author wrote http://localhost:8081/2/score?sessionkey=UICSNDK - it's not working...
I wrote in url and get sessionkey: "localhost:8081/4711/login --> UICSNDK"
I wrote in url this for Post request: "localhost:8081/2/score?sessionkey=UICSNDK" - not working and in chrome return 404 bad request
3.wrote in url this:"localhost:8081/2/highscorelist"
Please help me, I am beginner.

The difference between GET and POST is that with a GET request the data you wish to pass to the endpoint is done by modifying the url itself by adding parameters to it.
With a POST any data you wish to send to the endpoint must be in the body of the request.
The body of a request is arbitrary data that comes after a blank line in the header The reqiest has the request line, following by any number of header attributes, then a blank line.
The server would need to know what the format of the body of the request was and parse it as appropriate.
Of course 'modern' frameworks like jax-rs allow you to automatically convert request data to objects, so that it is much simpler.

REST call in Java

I have a few questions about a specific REST call I'm making in JAVA. I'm quite the novice, so I've cobbled this together from several sources. The call itself looks like this:
String src = AaRestCall.subTrackingNum(trackingNum);
The Rest call class looks like this:
public class AaRestCall {
public static String subTrackingNum (Sting trackingNum) throws IOException {
URL url = new URL("https://.../rest/" + trackingNum);
String query = "{'TRACKINGNUM': trackingNum}";
//make connection
URLConnection urlc = url.openConnection();
//use post mode
urlc.setDoOutput(true);
urlc.setAllowUserInteraction(false);
//send query
PrintStream ps = new PrintStream(urlc.getOutputStream());
ps.print(query);
ps.close();
//get result
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(urlc
.getInputStream()));
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
String line = null;
while ((line=br.readLine())!=null) {
sb.append(line);
}
br.close();
return sb.toString();
}
}
Now, I have a few questions on top of the what is wrong with this in general.
1) If this rest call is returning a JSON object, is that going to get screwed up by going to a String?
2) What's the best way to parse out the JSON that is returning?
3) I'm not really certain how to format the query field. I assume that's supposed to be documented in the REST API?
Thanks in advance.

REST is a pattern applied on top of HTTP. From your questions, it seems to me that you first need to understand how HTTP (and chatty socket protocols in general) works and what the Java API offers for deal with it.
You can use whatever Json library out there to parse the HTTP response body (provided it's a 200 OK, that you need to check for, and also watch out for HTTP redirects!), but it's not how things are usually built.
If the service exposes a real RESTful interface (opposed to a simpler HTTP+JSON) you'll need to use four HTTP verbs, and URLConnection doesn't let you do so. Plus, you'll likely want to add headers for authentication, or maybe cookies (which in fact are just HTTP headers, but are still worth to be considered separately). So my suggestion is building the client-side part of the service with the HttpClient from Apache commons, or maybe some JAX-RS library with client support (for example Apache CXF). In that way you'll have full control of the communication while also getting nicer abstractions to work with, instead of consuming the InputStream provided by your URLConnection and manually serializing/deserializing parameters/responses.
Regarding the bit about how to format the query field, again you first need to grasp the basics of HTTP. Anyway, the definite answer depends on the remote service implementation, but you'll face four options:
The query string in the service URL
A form-encoded body of your HTTP request
A multipart body of your HTTP request (similar to the former, but the different MIME type is enough to give some headache) - this is often used in HTTP+JSON services that also have a website, and the same URL can be used for uploading a form that contains a file input
A service-defined (for example application/json, or application/xml) encoding for your HTTP body (again, it's really the same as the previous two points, but the different MIME encoding means that you'll have to use a different API)

Oh my. There are a couple of areas where you can improve on this code. I'm not even going to point out the errors since I'd like you to replace the HTTP calls with a HTTP client library. I'm also unaware of the spec required by your API so getting you to use the POST or GET methods properly at this level of abstraction will take more work.
1) If this rest call is returning a JSON object, is that going to get
screwed up by going to a String?
No, but marshalling that json into an obect is your job. A library like google gson can help.
2) What's the best way to parse out the JSON that is returning?
I like to use gson like I mentioned above, but you can use another marshal/unmarhal library.
3) I'm not really certain how to format the query field. I assume
that's supposed to be documented in the REST API?
Yes. Take a look at the documentation and come up with java objects that mirror the json structure. You can then parse them with the following code.
gson.fromJson(json, MyStructure.class);
Http client
Please take a look at writing your HTTP client using a library like apache HTTP client which will make your job much easier.
Testing
Since you seem to be new to this, I'd also suggest you take a look at a tool like Postman which can help you test your API calls if you suspect that the code you've written is faulty.

I think that you should use a REST client library instead of writing your own, unless it is for educational purposes - then by all means go nuts!
The REST service will respond to your call with a HTTP response, the payload may and may not be formatted as a JSON string. If it is, I suggest that you use a JSON parsing library to convert that String into a Java representation.
And yes, you will have to resort to the particular REST API:s documentation for details.
P.S. The java URL class is broken, use URI instead.

Java - send HTTP POST request without downloading all the content

Is it possible to send HTTP POST request to a webserver and retrieve just headers of response or read just few bytes of the body, so the rest won't be downloaded at all (so it won't consume traffic)? If yes, how?
I know that there is a HEAD method for this, but I need to achieve it by POST method .. well, I am not sure if I need the POST method, I just need to post the data. Maybe if the webserver isn't secured well enough (it doesn't check what method it's used - it's just directly access the post data), is it possible to send "post data" by HEAD request?

There is no built-in HTTP mechanism for this, and HTTP HEAD requests do not allow content in the body. If however you are the one writing the server code then anything is possible.
If this is the case, I would suggest a URL parameter that triggers this behavior. For example:
POST /myURL - This would return the whole response
POST /myURL?body=minimal - Returns the reduced size response that you are looking for.
And you would have to code your server method to construct and return the appropriate response based on the URL parameter.

is there any tool to simulate http requests in java

I am trying to simulate HTTP requests in Java with the URL class and the HttpURLConnection class, the GET requests are easy to simulate while some POST requests seem harder because most POST request need Cookie in the request header. Some cookies were set by the HTTP response in the Set-Cookie field and I can get them by the function provided by HttpURLConnection, but I found that other cookies may be set by JavaScript and I have no way to handle them, so I wonder is there any packaged tool to simulate HTTP requests in Java?

try Apache commons Httpclient:
http://hc.apache.org/httpclient-3.x/

Why do you need to generate HTTP requests? Do you want to perform some stress tests?
I'd advise using something like JMeter (you can find a brief tutorial here).
Hope this helps something, it's better to avoid reinventing the wheel (if you need something like this, but it wasn't clear for me from your question).

For the cookie set with Javascript, you could try to parse the HTTP response, extract the cookie information and set it for your next request
For example, lets say, the response has code which calls a setCookie() function (setCookie is user-defined javascript function),
...
//some javascript code
setCookie("username", "johndoe");
//some more javascript
...
then you would extract the line setCookie() and the parse it for the name and value

What's the easiest way to get the result of an HTTP GET request in using URL in JRuby

I'm attempting to build a Tropo Ruby application and I need to retrieve the result of an HTTPS GET. The Tropo platform doesn't have the httpclient Ruby gem so I can't use that. The Ruby engine used is JRuby so a suggestion has been to make use of the Java URL class to do the request. I've played around with it a little bit and I seem to be able to create the URL object ok but am now struggling with how to get the results of executing the request. How do I do it?
javaURL = java.net.URL.new svcURL
transferResult = javaURL.getContent()

I am not sure what getContent() does exactly, but you can use openStream() which gives you an InputStream to read from.
javaURL = java.net.URL.new svcURL
transfer = javaURL.openStream()
// read from stream
transfer.close()