Question

I am trying to issue a simple POST request to a webservice which returns some XML in Scala.

It seems that Dispatch is the standard library used for this task, but I cannot find documentation for it. The main site, which I link above, explains at length what is a promise and how to do asynchronous programming, but does not actually document the API. There is a periodic table – which looks a bit scary – but it only seems useful to people who already know what to do and only need a reminder for the cryptic syntax.

It also seems that Scalaz has some facility for HTTP, but I cannot find any documentation for it either.

Answer 1

I use the following: https://github.com/scalaj/scalaj-http.

Here’s a simple GET request:

import scalaj.http.{Http, HttpOptions}

Http("http://example.com/search").param("q", "monkeys").asString

and an example of a POST:

val result = Http("http://example.com/url").postData("""{"id":"12","json":"data"}""")
  .header("Content-Type", "application/json")
  .header("Charset", "UTF-8")
  .option(HttpOptions.readTimeout(10000)).asString

Scalaj HTTP is available through SBT:

libraryDependencies += "org.scalaj" % "scalaj-http_2.11" % "2.3.0"