async-http-client

I was looking around for a way to intercept low-level HTTP events (such as time-to-first-byte) with Apache’s HTTPClient library as part of a new integration testing suite we’re developing at work, but to no avail.

Then I stumbled across the async-http-client library from Ning. It’s lightweight, uses Netty under the hood, can be used synchronously or asynchronously as you see fit, and has a much more intuitive builder-based API than HTTPClient.

I’d provide code samples, but the little PDF manual included in the source distro is more than enough to get you going in style. I think this is going to be my defacto HTTP client library for Java moving forward.