A Much Simpler HTTP Lib for Android

A much simpler HTTP lib for Android

A couple of days ago, I wrote up a post about Square’s OkHttp library. That was ok (pun intended), but kevinsawicki’s HttpRequest library is much simpler.

This is an excerpt from a demo app using HttpRequest, and it does the exact same thing as my OkHttp demo app:

Compare that with OkHttp’s version:

Notice the difference? HttpRequest only needs one line to do it’s thing, OkHttp needs a bit more. Now, I believe that OkHttp is intended to be a bit more general purpose, and it’s still pre-release, and without documentation. So, to be fair to OkHttp, I’m sure that there are things that it does really well, and I also think that it may be more performant than HttpRequest, at least based on the brief presentation that I heard on OkHttp.

Still, if I need to build something quickly, especially just for demonstration purposes, I really appreciate the brevity of HttpRequest.

Check out the full demo app on github. You can compare that with the demo that I did for OkHttp a few days ago. The only difference is the http library used, everything else is copied.