Java: Read POST data from a socket on an HTTP server

Question

I have a website (python/django) that needs to use a load of Java resources that may or may not be on the same server. Therefore I am writing a mini webserver in Java that will receive a request and then when processing is finished, POST some data back to a url on the site.

I have got the java code receiving connections on sockets and responding with some simple HTML.

My problem is that I will POST data to the Java server and that code needs to act on the data. How do I go about reading the data that is posted in the HTML request, if it is even possible. If not, is there any other way you would do this.

If you think I am going about this in completely the wrong way then please tell me and I will consider another method, but after conversing with some Java developers, this seemed like the best way for what I was doing.

Thanks

Answer 1

You probably don't need to write a http server yourself, just use some lightweight java web server/servlet container like jetty or simple

and looks here if you still want to know how to parse a http POST request http://www.jmarshall.com/easy/http/#postmethod

Answer 2

In your case I probably wouldn't work with low level socket connections.

I recommend you to use a servlet container with some sort of webservice or maybe only a simple servlet depending on your needs. With a servlet you can easily access the POST data, process it and return something to the caller.

If you don't want to use a stand alone servlet container like Tomcat you can try an embeddable servlet container like Jetty or winstone servlet container.

If you need something more sophisticated you can use some webservice technology like JAX-RS or JAX-WS. This allows you to provide a fully featured API for your Java resources in an easy way.