Making an HTTP request for a protected resource

In this recipe, we will look at invoking an HTTP resource that has been protected by user credentials. http://httpbin.org/basic-auth/user/passwd has been protected by HTTP basic authentication. Basic authentication requires a username and a password to be provided in plain text, which is then used by the HTTP resources to decide whether the user authentication is successful. 

If you open http://httpbin.org/basic-auth/user/passwd in the browser, it will prompt you for the username and password:

Enter the username as user and password as passwd, and you will be authenticated to be shown a JSON response:

{
  "authenticated": true,
  "user": "user"
}

Let's achieve the same thing using the HttpClient API.

 

How to do it...

1. We need to extend java.net.Authenticator and override its getPasswordAuthentication() method. This method should return an instance of java.net.PasswordAuthentication. Let's create a class, UsernamePasswordAuthenticator, which extends...