How to read XML response from a URL in java?

I need to write a simple function that takes a URL and processes the response which is XML or JSON, I have checked the Sun website https://swingx-ws.dev.java.net/servlets/ProjectDocumentList , but the HttpRequest object is to be found nowhere, is it possible to do this in Java? I`m writting a rich client end app.

For xml parsing of an inputstream you can do:

// the SAX way:
XMLReader myReader = XMLReaderFactory.createXMLReader();
myReader.setContentHandler(handler);
myReader.parse(new InputSource(new URL(url).openStream()));

// or if you prefer DOM:
DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
Document doc = db.parse(new URL(url).openStream());

But to communicate over http from server to client I prefer using hessian library or springs http invoker lib

If you want to print XML directly onto the screen you can use TransformerFactory

URL url = new URL(urlString);
URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();

DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
Document doc = builder.parse(conn.getInputStream());

TransformerFactory transformerFactory= TransformerFactory.newInstance();
Transformer xform = transformerFactory.newTransformer();

// that’s the default xform; use a stylesheet to get a real one
xform.transform(new DOMSource(doc), new StreamResult(System.out));

Get your response via a regular http-request, using:

• Apache HttpComponents
• the built-in URLConnection con = new URL("http://example.com").openConnection();

The next step is parsing it. Take a look at this article for a choice of parser.

If you specifically want to use SwingX-WS, then have a look at XmlHttpRequest and JSONHttpRequest.

More on those classes in the XMLHttpRequest and Swing blog post.