Creating a standard Java HTTP client

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

Getting ready

You need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation, as we described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe in Chapter 1, Getting Started.

To correctly execute the following commands, you will need an index populated with the ch04/populate_kibana.txt commands that are available in the online code.

A Maven tool or an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that natively supports it for Java programming, such as Visual Studio Code, Eclipse, or IntelliJ IDEA, must be installed. Elasticsearch code is targeting Java 17, so it's best practice to have installed JDK 17 or above.

The code for this recipe is in the chapter_13/http_java_client directory...