Using “HttpClient(Apache Commons – HttpClient)”:http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/httpclient/ I knocked up a simple Java API for “del.icio.us(del.icio.us – the social bookmark manager)”:http://del.icio.us/. It worked, but I quickly hit limitations of what the “del.icio.us API(Documentation for the del.icio.us API)”:http://del.icio.us/api/ itself would let me do – for example there is no way to get all bookmarks for a category. I sent off a feature request, so we’ll see what happens – but for what I wanted to do the current API isn’t good enough.

HttpClient itself did exactly what I wanted, which I guess is all you can ask of an OS project. The documentation was a little lacking, and the dependencies on “commons-codec”:http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/codec/ and “commons-logging”:http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/logging/ was annoying, however it worked well and gave sensible errors when required.

Along the way I looked at using “XStream”:http://xstream.codehaus.org/. I was planning to use it to process the results from the calls to del.icio.us, but the nature of the XML meant that this isn’t possible without transforming the results first. I would have no hesitation in recommending XStream for XML serialization, assuming you aren’t already constrained in the nature of your XML schema.