Creating an HTTP client

An HTTP Client is one of the easiest clients to create. It's very handy because it allows calling not only the internal methods as the Native protocol does, but also the third-party calls implemented in plugins that can be called only via HTTP.

Getting ready

You need a working ElasticSearch cluster and Maven installed. The code of this recipe is in the chapter_10/http_client directory present in the code bundle available on Packt's website.

How to do it...

For creating an HTTP client, we will perform the steps given as follows:

1. For these examples, we have chosen the Apache HttpComponents that is one of the most famous libraries to execute HTTP calls. This library is available in the main Maven repository search.Maven.org. To enable the compilation in your Maven pom.xml project, just add:

   <dependency>
     <groupId>org.apache.httpcomponents</groupId>
     <artifactId>httpclient</artifactId>
     <version>4.3</version>
   </dependency>

2. If...