HttpClient module is a full-featured, standards compliant HTTP client.

Features:

-Standards based, pure Java, implementation of HTTP versions 1.0 and 1.1
-Full implementation of all HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS, and TRACE) in an extensible OO framework.
-Supports encryption with HTTPS (HTTP over SSL) protocol.
-Transparent connections through HTTP proxies.
-Tunneled HTTPS connections through HTTP proxies, via the CONNECT method.
-Basic, Digest authentication schemes. Please note NTLM is supported only partially.
-Plug-in mechanism for custom authentication schemes.
-Pluggable secure socket factories, making it easier to use third party solutions
-Connection management support for use in multi-threaded applications. Supports setting the maximum total connections as well as the maximum connections per host. Detects and closes stale connections.
-Automatic Cookie handling for reading Set-Cookie: headers from the server and sending them back out in a Cookie: header when appropriate.
-Plug-in mechanism for custom cookie policies.
-Request output streams to avoid buffering any content body by streaming directly to the socket to the server.
-Response input streams to efficiently read the response body by streaming directly from the socket to the server.
-Persistent connections using KeepAlive in HTTP/1.0 and persistance in HTTP/1.1
-Direct access to the response code and headers sent by the server.
-The ability to set connection timeouts.
-Source code is freely available under the Apache License.

Contents from the Official Producer’s website