I am doing some HTTP-based integration work for a client on a GWT-based project (which is why I wanted to know which HttpClient version to use). I'm still waiting on access to the third-party system, but I've already written and tested the code to generate the XML request and parse the XML response, so I wanted to take a step farther and write the code that would connect that with HTTP:

• Generate XML using the XML writer/generator
• Send the XML over HTTP
• Wait for the HTTP Response, check it (status code, etc)
• Parse the HTTP response's body using the XML parser/reader

But if I were going to do that, I want to test it, and testing it requires something to listen for HTTP requests (or to mock out the HTTP client, but this is already a pretty thin layer). I don't have access to the real service yet, so I can't write an integration test and, to be honest, I tend to try not to rely on integration tests. So basically I want something that can pretend to be an HTTP Server of some kind but that has an API that makes writing test code convenient. I went looking for candidates to easily test an HTTP-based client in Java.

When I'm picking tools in other platforms, I often consider the popularity of the dependency as well as other signs of its maturity. In Java, it's hard to get good numbers for such things. First of all, while there are some dependency management systems for Java, they're not universal or nearly-universal like they are on other platforms. Maven's central repository is probably the closest thing to that, but even then, there are lots of projects that download their dependencies directly. And, sadly, Maven doesn't publish stats about their dependencies, stats you could use to gauge how many other people are using and trusting a particular library vs. another.

However, after looking at some of the alternatives, I decided to start with mocky.io. That worked pretty well, but I don't really love using an external server for a simple test. That test wouldn't run offline, wouldn't run if the internet was down, or if mocky.io was having problems. It's basically too much of an integration test, and not even an integration test against the real service. Still, it worked well, and it's a reasonable place to start if you just want to fire up a simple test without adding new dependencies to your project.

I looked at alternatives to replace it. WireMock has a reputation for being very capable and having a good API, but perhaps not kept as up-to-date as one might like and a little heavy-weight. I also looked at MockServer, which looks very capable but also looks pretty heavy. My requirements for now are super-simple, so I ended up using okhttp's MockWebServer, one of Square's open-source projects. It's very simple, reasonably light, very fast, and has enough capability for my simple needs. I like it.

There are lots of alternatives, from something custom (Netty, RxNetty, Spray) to other competitive libraries (jailer,mock-http-server) and services (Sandbox), but for the moment, MockWebServer does the job for me.