Hi, can you recommend any (maybe Kotlin based) HTT...

# announcements

[alex]

Hi, can you recommend any (maybe Kotlin based) HTTP client library? I am using OkHttp at the moment and gathered experience with Jersey... I am thinking of trying out http://hc.apache.org (Apache HttpComponents) What do you think?

[Pierre-Luc Paour]

HttpClient is old and very obtuse, I wouldn't recommend it

[alex]

Yes, this is what is mentioned in the URL provided... Apache HttpComponents is the successor

[alex]

the URL name is missleading

[alex]

It should be rather "I am thinking of trying out Apache HttpComponents "

[Pierre-Luc Paour]

Same difference 🙂

[alex]

just updated my initial question... you mean HttpComponents is not worth it?

[alex]

http://search.maven.org/#search%7Cga%7C1%7Ca%3A%22httpcore5%22 looks quite up-to-date?

[Pierre-Luc Paour]

HTTP2 support is still not in a stable release for example

[alex]

can you recommend anything else than OkHttp as an alternative?

[Pierre-Luc Paour]

I guess it would depend on the reason you want an alternative to OkHttp.

[Pierre-Luc Paour]

To gain experience, the Apache stuff is probably fine

[Pierre-Luc Paour]

I wouldn't use it in a shipping product; too big and unwieldly (unless their design philosophy took a radical turn)

[Pierre-Luc Paour]

I'm also approaching this from the point of view of Android. Server-side, use-cases are different

[alex]

e.g. OkHttp does not provider a serializer and instead of doing things like Response<MyDTO> myModel = response.body(); (which is e.g. possible with Jersey) I need to to explicitly use e.g. Jackson for deserialization.

[alex]

which is too much low level details in the code

[alex]

also I am not doing any Android stuff...

[alex]

but I also do not want a server-centric library. Or is OkHttp a bad choice when I want to e.g. run performance tests which requires a high throughput HTTP library?

[christophsturm]

i recomment http4k. okhttp is a really bad library imo

[christophsturm]

with http4k you have a nice kotlin api and you can plug in any client lib that you want, i would recommend jetty-client

[christophsturm]

also check out the #C5AL3AKUY channel

[alex]

@christophsturm thanks, look nice. Still I use Java for the backend... is the API interoperable with Java?

[alex]

I've made an awful experience with Scala library & Java interop 7y ago...

[christophsturm]

I think http4k is kotlin only. if you need a java library go with jetty-client

[christophsturm]

do you need the client lib in the backend?

[alex]

yes, primarily for the backend

[christophsturm]

ok, then i recommend jetty-client

[alex]

I am not doing any Android development

[alex]

do have any experience with Jersey?

[alex]

I made good experience with Jersey... so in case you could compare Jersey w/ jetty-client

[christophsturm]

i guess jersey is much more high level

[christophsturm]

if jersey works for you just use this. but if you want just a http client i recommend jetty-client

[alex]

why shouldn't http4k work for Java as well? Isn't Kotlin 100% Java interoperable?

[alex]

I've made bad experience with Scala which was "interoperable" too... but from Kotlin I express to deliver what it promises

[Lucas Ribeiro]

http4k have interoperability with Java, but was not made to support Java, so some annotations and features may work or don`t work well in java.

See this issue : https://github.com/http4k/http4k/issues/77

[alex]

ok, thanks.

[alex]

I just checked the inner cogs of http4k... basically it offers wrappers around the major 3 HTTP clients that we mentioned in this thread:
* OkHttp
* HttpComponents
* Jetty Client

[alex]

I guess, for the the next implementation I will go with jetty-client. Unlike HttpComponents jetty-client supports HTTP2. And unlike OkHttp it is not constrained by Android, e.g. jetty-client requires Java 8, whereas OkHttp is also fine with Java 7 and hence cannot use native lambda implementations.