I'm new to Java development so please bear with me. Also, I hope I'm not the champion of tl;dr :).

I'm using HttpClient to make requests over Http (duh!) and I'd gotten it to work for a simple servlet that receives an URL as a query string parameter. I realized that my code could use some refactoring, so I decided to make my own HttpResponseHandler, to clean up the code, make it reusable and improve exception handling.

I currently have something like this:

public class HttpResponseHandler implements ResponseHandler<InputStream>{

    public InputStream handleResponse(HttpResponse response)
            throws ClientProtocolException, IOException {

        int statusCode = response.getStatusLine().getStatusCode();
        InputStream in = null;

        if (statusCode != HttpStatus.SC_OK) {
            throw new HttpResponseException(statusCode, null);
        } else {
            HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
            if (entity != null) {
                in = entity.getContent();
                // This works
                // for (int i;(i = in.read()) >= 0;) System.out.print((char)i); 
            }
        }
        return in;
    }
}

And in the method where I make the actual request:

HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpGet httpget = new HttpGet(target);
ResponseHandler<InputStream> httpResponseHandler = new HttpResponseHandler();
try {
    InputStream in = httpclient.execute(httpget, httpResponseHandler);
    // This doesn't work
    // for (int i;(i = in.read()) >= 0;) System.out.print((char)i);     
    return in;
} catch (HttpResponseException e) {
throw new HttpResponseException(e.getStatusCode(), null);
}

The problem is that the input stream returned from the handler is closed. I don't have any idea why, but I've checked it with the prints in my code (and no, I haven't used them both at the same time :). While the first print works, the other one gives a closed stream error.

I need InputStreams, because all my other methods expect an InputStream and not a String. Also, I want to be able to retrieve images (or maybe other types of files), not just text files.

I can work around this pretty easily by giving up on the response handler (I have a working implementation that doesn't use it), but I'm pretty curious about the following:

1. Why does it do what it does?
2. How do I open the stream, if something closes it?
3. What's the right way to do this, anyway :)?

I've checked the docs and I couldn't find anything useful regarding this issue. To save you a bit of Googling, here's the Javadoc and here's the HttpClient tutorial (Section 1.1.8 - Response handlers).

Thanks,
Alex