Question

I’ve developed an Java servlet that can proxy HTTP requests from a browser.
I am having an issue proxying HTTPS requests.
The servlet doesn’t appear to receive any HTTPS requests from the browser.
Upon investigating this further I noticed that HTTP requests seem to start with a simple GET request whereas the HTTPS requests start with a CONNECT request as shown by the log extract below:

"CONNECT ajax.googleapis.com:443 HTTP/1.1" 200

My question is, is it possible to handle this request using my servlet?

public class MyProxyServlet extends HttpServlet {
    @Override
    public void init(final ServletConfig config) throws ServletException {
        super.init(config);
    }

    @Override
    protected void doGet(final HttpServletRequest request,
            final HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException,
            IOException {
    }

    @Override
    protected void doPost(final HttpServletRequest request,
            final HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException,
            IOException {
    }
}

If so where and how?

Answer 1

Since the CONNECT verb is not handled by the default HttpServlet implementation, you will have to override the Service method of the javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet in your servlet and handle the CONNECT method yourself. The original implementation seems to ignore this with this resp.sendError(HttpServletResponse.SC_NOT_IMPLEMENTED, errMsg);. Take a look at the HttpServlet source code http://www.docjar.com/html/api/javax/servlet/http/HttpServlet.java.html