Spring Integration or Apache HTTP Client

Question

I have a spring application which requires to call REST based external API calls for some data.

The data format from the API is JSON.

My question is which o

Answer 1

Spring comes with a class called RestTemplate (javadoc) that should make this sort of thing easy. It hides the HTTP handling and provides a REST-style operations interface. It includes support for message converters for converting to and from JSON (in this case, Spring has support for the Jackson library).

Spring Integration is huge overkill for this - REST is inherently simple. Commons HttpClient would work, but leaves you with extra work to do on top of that.

See the section of the Spring docs on how to use RestTemplate, and the JSON message conversion.