title: Utilizing persistence with Apache HttpClient?
body: <p>My goal is to connect to a server and then maintain the connection. The server keeps pushing me some data whenever it has any. I wrote the following but it works only the first time. The second time onwards, it gives me an exception saying that the get.getResponseBodyAsStream() is null. I was thinking that Apache's HTTPClient keeps the connection alive by default so what I understand is that I need a blocking call somewhere. Can someone help me out here?</p>
  
  <pre><code>        GetMethod get = new GetMethod(url);
          String nextLine;
          String responseBody = "";
          BufferedReader input;
  
          try {
              httpClient.executeMethod(get);
              while(true) {
                  try {
                      input = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(get.getResponseBodyAsStream()));
  
                      while ((nextLine = input.readLine()) != null)
                          responseBody += nextLine;
                      System.out.println(responseBody);
                  } catch (IOException ex) {
                      ex.printStackTrace();
                  }
              }
          } catch (Exception e) {
              e.printStackTrace();
          }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Actually at the end of the day, I am trying to get a persistent connection to the server (I will handle possible errors later) so that I can keep receiving updates from my server. Any pointers on this would be great.</p>