Java http connection

I want setup a http connection to send request and get the response in an stand alone java application, can any one help me h开发者_StackOverflowow can i proceed with this????

HttpURLConnection connection = null;
    try {
        URL url = new URL("www.google.com");
        connection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
        connection.connect();
        connection.getInputStream();
                    // do something with the input stream here

    } catch (MalformedURLException e1) {
        e1.printStackTrace();
    } catch (IOException e1) {
        e1.printStackTrace();
    } finally {
        if(null != connection) { connection.disconnect(); }
    }

You can use URLConnection class bundled with standard Java (since JDK 1.0!), or a higher level HTTP client such as Apache's HTTPCLIENT which will provide, in addition to plain HTTP, higher level components like cookies, standard headers and more.

A couple of answers have already pointed out Apache HTTP Client, but they link to version 3.x, which is no longer maintained. You should use version 4, which has a slightly different API, if you want to use this library: http://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client-4.0.1/index.html