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);
        }
    }
}

That can be golfed a bit:

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

oh this is lovely

Thanks @leto. I applied your suggestion.

This is comparing HTTP client libraries... and your Perl code does not have the host port defined...

@egonw, the credentials method expects $host to be of the form domain[:port], e.g., "foo.com:8080".

Crappy apache libs are crappy. You're so clever.

@heller, a more constructive comment would be to point out a nicer library and maybe short code example. My impression was that apache libs are the gold standard for doing web stuff in java. I was motivated to post this as I was developing a mobile app for Android and the apache libs are what the Android API provide. So they must not be that crappy.

@ironcamel You can't take the high road after starting a "Java sucks" dogpile.

Here is a quick groovy 1.7.4 Basic Auth Example
@grab(group='org.codehaus.groovy.modules.http-builder', module='http-builder', version='0.5.0' )

def authSite = new groovyx.net.http.HTTPBuilder( 'http://10.110.201.115/~juanvazquez/basicAuth/' )
authSite.auth.basic 'test', 'this'
println authSite.get( path:'testAuth.html' )

By way of reconciliation, I made a couple small utilities which are hopefully helpful to you (or at least mildly entertaining). Cheers!

http://github.com/heller/Java-Utils/blob/master/src/com/whatevermatt/net/CliHttpGet.java

@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.