2 minute read

I’ve got some requirements where I need to call a REST web service from an Android device, so I figured I’d get back to basics, and try to call a REST service through a simple Java application, just to see if I can get it working.

After trawling the web for what seemed like hours, I was finally able to come up with a simple yet effective solution. Consider the following

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.net.HttpURLConnection;
import java.net.URL;

/**
 * This simple class demonstrates how to call a 
 * REST web service provided by Yahoo! Developer Network APIs
 * @author james.elsey
 * @date 05/October/2010
 */
public class RestTest {

	public static void main(String[] args) 
	{
		
		String yahooAppId = "sam.A2DV34EOgopFWeVeqLVnaoTVmEIVZnVtd58o5IRCsZ4kcwBTSp4gVl9E7hnnbRxDgRo-";
		String URL = "http://where.yahooapis.com/geocode?location=701+First+Ave,+Sunnyvale,+CA&appid=";

		String URLtoCall = URL + yahooAppId;
		
		try 
		{
			String responseString = httpGet(URLtoCall);
			
			// Do something with the returned response, currently just printing to console
			System.out.println(responseString);
		} 
		catch (IOException e) 
		{
			// Handle exception here, currently just printing stack trace
			e.printStackTrace();
		}

	}
	
	/**
	 * Call URL and buffer response into a String
	 * @param urlString URL to be called
	 * @return String The response XML String
	 * @throws IOException
	 */
	public static String httpGet(String urlString) throws IOException 
	{
		  URL url = new URL(urlString);
		  HttpURLConnection conn =
		      (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();

		  // Check for successful response code or throw error
		  if (conn.getResponseCode() != 200) 
		  {
		    throw new IOException(conn.getResponseMessage());
		  }

		  // Buffer the result into a string
		  BufferedReader buffrd = new BufferedReader(
		      new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));
		  StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
		  String line;
		  while ((line = buffrd.readLine()) != null) 
		  {
		    sb.append(line);
		  }

		  buffrd.close();
		  conn.disconnect();
		  return sb.toString();
	}
	
}

This simple piece of code will create a URL to be called, call it, and print out the result which in this case is an XML String. This is a particualry basic way of consuming a REST service, and using 3rd party libraries such as Apache HTTP Commons may provide a cleaner and more effective solution

This will give you a XML String response, its up to you how you deal with the response, you can parse it using SAX for example. In my next tutorial I’ll look at parsing, and how we can intergrate this all with an Android application

I was quite impressed with the documentation and support provided by the Yahoo! Developer Network, I will certainly be using this more frequently as their web services are easier to use than Googles, which is an odd occasion

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