Mastering Microservices with Java - Third Edition

Java 11 HTTPClient

HttpClient was officially introduced with Java 11. It was first introduced in Java 9 as an incubator. You could say it is a new version of java.net.HttpUrlConnection.

It offers many new features:

• Supports both HTTP 1.1 and HTTP 2 (default)
• Supports both synchronous and asynchronous calls
• Provides reactive data and streams to both request and response with non-blocking back pressure

It works very well in asynchronous mode and with streams. However, here, we'll only cover the synchronous calls to align with other REST clients.

First, we'll add a provider class that will build the HttpClient and provide methods to build and send HTTP requests, as shown in the following example:

public class RestClient { HttpClient httpClient ...