tags : Spring Boot, Spring RestTemplate URL : howtodoinjava.com
Spring WebClient is a non-blocking and reactive web client to perform HTTP requests. The WebClient has been added in Spring 5 and provides the fluent functional-style API for sending HTTP requests and handling the responses.
Before Spring 5, RestTemplate has been the primary technique for client-side HTTP accesses, which is part of the Spring MVC project. In Spring 5 and Spring 6, using _WebClient_ is the recommended approach.
To use WebClient api, we must have spring-boot-starter-webflux module imported into the project.
pom.xml
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-webflux</artifactId>
</dependency>1. Creating a Spring WebClient Instance
To create _WebClient_ bean, we can follow any one of the given approaches.
1.1. Using WebClient.create()
The create() method is an overloaded method and can optionally accept a base URL for requests.
WebClient webClient1 = WebClient.create(); //with empty URI
WebClient webClient2 = WebClient.create("https://client-domain.com");1.2. Using WebClient.Builder API
We can also build the client using the DefaultWebClientBuilder class, which uses builder pattern style fluent-API.
WebClient webClient2 = WebClient.builder()
.baseUrl("http://localhost:3000")
.defaultCookie("cookie-name", "cookie-value")
.defaultHeader(HttpHeaders.CONTENT_TYPE, MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE)
.build();