What's the preferred library for sending HTTP requ...

# announcements

[tschuchort]

What's the preferred library for sending HTTP requests? I don't need anything fancy, just basic cookie/session functionality and minimal setup

[dalexander]

ktor-client if you want to use something kotlin-native. Retrofit is pretty good otherwise. There are a bunch of other Java options out there if one of those doesn’t suit your needs.

[tschuchort]

Which Java library would you recommend? It doesn't have to be Kotlin specific if the Java libraries have better docs

[tschuchort]

I think retrofit is a bit too involved for what I want to do. I just want to write a small script to automate clicking a button on a website

[Casey Brooks]

Retrofit is a wrapper over OkHttp, which would be my recommendation in that case

[Casey Brooks]

But to be honest, I think you’d end up writing less code using Retrofit than you would be using OkHttp directly

[dalexander]

If you want the simplest thing possible, try something like the apache fluent http client. Which is a little bit weak overall but easy to get started with IMO. (OkHttp might also be good for that, I haven’t used it directly before).

[tschuchort]

It seems to me that Retrofit is a lot more "enterprise" and requires more setup. I just need to send a login request, then use the returned session cookie to send another http request. I'll take a look at OkHttp

[Corey Johnson]

With Retrofit you just have to set up an interface and a class that creates the service using a builder

https://square.github.io/retrofit/