Best way to read data from another website

Question

Here's the situation:

I have a web application (Java servlets) at "mycompany.com". A business partner is going to supply me with data from his application at "yourcompany.com".

His application is driven by a web form (POST). I know nothing about his application other than the results will always be returned via a web page.

For example, if I create a static HTML form with a submit button and send it to his web site, I get the results in my browser.

I can create that web form in my application, but now - how to I read the results from his web site?

Any ideas?

-R

Answer 1

Sounds like you want to do some screen scraping - check out XQuery for that.

Answer 2

If he were up for upgrading how he does it, Web Services (specifically, SOAP) would be a standard, maintainable way to pass data between applications on a network.

Answer 3

If you want finer control in the process and not to XMLize the HTML page, I would use HttpClient + HTML Parser