Question

I have a third party server that is periodically sending http post request messages to an URL(can be configured). In my application I am reading data by starting a jetty server and listening for data on the configured URL.
Wondering if it is possible to listen for the data sent by the server without starting any server like the jetty?

Answer 1

You can always create a socket yourself and listen at port 80 (or something similar) for HTTP requests. See http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/net/ServerSocket.html

But there are several problems: Theres a lot of overhead that you need to do yourself. Parse the HTTP request, extract the headers and the body and depending on the headers you need to do certain things like caching, authentication, etc. And that’s a lot of stuff you need to implement. Using an existing web server is usually a better idea, since the people who wrote it (usually) know exactly what they are doing.

Another option is the Apache HttpCore library (http://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-core-ga/index.html). You can use it to write your own Http Server… But again, there’s still a lot of stuff you need to take care of …

If you want to do it for learning purposes, go ahead and implement it yourself. When it is for production, stick with the commonly used web servers.