http async response for large response

Question

I'm familiar with android HTTPURLConnection and apache HTTPConnection classes and the way they work (they are all synchronous, but I can live with that).

I have a large response with many lines of data comming from the server. It's a JSON response and I can display the data partially before I parsed all the response. Some json parsers allow that (like xcers allows for xml). Do the callbacks and methods related to the two classes mentioned above allow it? When I get the response from HTTPURLConnection upon opening input stream and read, do I open the stream when ALL the data is already there? Or can I open and read it and more that should follow?

Also, is there any http method on android that works with NIO?

Answer 1

With HttpClient, when you open the response stream like this:

HttpGet request = new HttpGet();
request.setURI(new URI(url));
HttpResponse response = client.execute(request);
HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
InputStream stream = entity.getContent();

and start reading, you actually start the downloading and you get new bytes as soon as these are received. You don't wait for everything to get downloaded to start reading.

As far as I know the HttpClient that is bundled with Android is not based on NIO. I don't know of any alternative that does so.

Answer 2

In addition to all of the possible solutions in Ladlestein's comment, there's the simple answer of wrapping all that in an AsyncTask. Here is a sample project demonstrating doing an HTTP request using HttpClient in an AsyncTask.