This is a comparison of making a simple http request with basic/digest authentication in perl and java. I was porting a perl app to the android platform (java) and was struck by the different amount of complexity and effort required.

simple-request.pl

use LWP::UserAgent;
my ($host, $realm, $user, $pass, $uri) = @ARGV;
my $agent = LWP::UserAgent->new()->credentials($host, $realm, $user, $pass);
print $agent->get($uri)->content();

SimpleRequest.java

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import org.apache.http.auth.AuthScope;
import org.apache.http.auth.UsernamePasswordCredentials;
import org.apache.http.impl.client.BasicCredentialsProvider;
import org.apache.http.impl.client.DefaultHttpClient;
import org.apache.http.client.methods.HttpGet;
import org.apache.http.HttpRequest;
import org.apache.http.HttpResponse;
public class SimpleRequest {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String host = args[0];
        int port = Integer.parseInt(args[1]);
        String realm = args[2];
        String username = args[3];
        String password = args[4];
        String uri = args[5];
        UsernamePasswordCredentials creds = new UsernamePasswordCredentials(
            username, password);
        AuthScope authScope = new AuthScope(host, port, realm);
        BasicCredentialsProvider credProvider = new BasicCredentialsProvider();
        credProvider.setCredentials(authScope, creds);
        DefaultHttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
        client.setCredentialsProvider(credProvider);
        HttpGet request = new HttpGet(uri);
        try {
            HttpResponse response = client.execute(request);
            BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(
                new InputStreamReader(response.getEntity().getContent()));
            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
            String line;
            while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
                sb.append(line);
            }
            System.out.println(sb.toString()));
        } catch (Exception e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        }
    }
}

@javazquez, that is indeed very neat. I will have to look into Groovy at some point.

@heller, thanks for the code! I think I will use your HttpGetter class in the app I am working on. It's definitely better to abstract away all that crud. At least I won't have to look at it. I noticed this was your first github project. I wish you many more.