Proxying a Request to Localhost in Java
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Join For FreeIt can be very convenient when developing to server based application to
run them using "localhost" in order to maintain consistency between
developer machines. This is normally a good idea but there is a small
case where this can cause problems.
Consider if you are running a local http proxy on your machine in order
to capture your HTTP traffic. (Cough perhaps even the one in JDeveloper I
work on). Then you might run into Java bug 6737819.
Basically by default JDK 1.6 was hard coded not to send any request to
localhost via a proxy which of course was a bit of a pain. Luckily a
workaround was put in where you could put the string "~localhost" in
your nonProxyHosts entry to turn of this feature:
java -client -classpath classes -Dhttp.proxyHost=localhost -Dhttp.proxyPort=8099 -Dhttp.nonProxyHosts=~localhost -Dhttps.proxyHost=localhost -Dhttps.proxyPort=8099 client.Example
Now moving forward to JDK 1.7 this workaround no longer works; but you need to take care to define nonProxyHosts as an empty string:
java -client -classpath classes -Dhttp.proxyHost=localhost -Dhttp.proxyPort=8099 -Dhttp.nonProxyHosts= -Dhttps.proxyHost=localhost -Dhttps.proxyPort=8099 client.Example
If you define this any anything other than an empty string the DefaultProxySelector though beware because internally it will append / or use the http.nonProxyHosts value from ../jre/lib/net.properties".
Just a minor complication that is not obvious from the published API.
Published at DZone with permission of Gerard Davison, DZone MVB. See the original article here.
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