URLConnection与HttpClient的对比

from:http://www.innovation.ch/java/HTTPClient/urlcon_vs_httpclient.html
[table]
||URLConnection|HTTPClient
|Methods|Only HEAD, GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, TRACE and OPTIONS.|Has HEAD, GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, TRACE and OPTIONS, plus any arbitrary method, such as those from WEBDav and IPP.
|Response Codes|The response code, headers, and body can only be read if the response code was less than 400 - for any 4xx or 5xx response code, you only get IOException's when trying to get any response info.|The response code, all headers, and the body can always be read normally.
|Proxies and SOCKS|Full support (SOCKS: Version 4 only)|Full support (SOCKS: both version 4 and 5)
|Authorization|Support for Basic and an early version of Digest in JDK 1.2 or later, only. The current version of Digest authentication (which is the one supported by most servers) is not supported, and due to a bug of theirs they won't even recognize the digest info returned by Apache.|Support for Basic and Digest Authentication; other schemes can be added.
|Cookies|No|Yes
|True request output streams|No - all data is fully buffered before it is sent.|Yes - HttpOutputStream will stream directly to the socket.
|True response input streams|Under JDK 1.2, yes; under JDK 1.3 only if the response is not sent using the chunked encoding (this excludes most server-push responses).|Yes.
|Persistent Connections|HTTP/1.0 Keep-Alive's in JDK 1.1 and JDK 1.2; JDK 1.3 has HTTP/1.1 persistence.|Supports HTTP/1.0 Keep-Alive's and HTTP/1.1 persistence.
|Pipelining of Requests|No.|Yes.
|Can set Timeouts|No.|Yes.
|Can handle protocols other than HTTP|Yes (e.g. ftp, gopher, mailto, and file are provided)|No.
|Can do HTTP over SSL (https)|Appropriate SSL package (such as JSSE) which provides an appropriate client must be installed.|Patches are available for various free and commercial SSL packages
|Source code available|No.|Yes.
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