HttpURLConnection.connect() times out, while wget works fine

[Ruben Matthews]

Hello Java friends

I have a problem where an application I am working on is throwing the following exception "java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out" after trying to connect() to a URI.

String url = "http://example.com/xml/fulltextsearch.jsp?query=someProfession&offset=0";
URL href = new URL (url);
HttpURLConnection hc = (HttpURLConnection) href.openConnection();
hc.setRequestMethod ("GET");

if(hc instanceof HttpURLConnection)
  System.out.println("YEEEEHAAAAH");

System.out.println("test1");
hc.connect();
System.out.println("test2");

This small test case outputs

YEEEEHAAAAH
test1

and then stalls....



I tried to "wget" the url from the box the application is running on and that works fine. It returns 200 OK. So, the url is accessible, but still connect() times out.

Any clue why?

[Ruben Matthews]

I just talked to our network admin and he explained to me it is caused by the fact that the application (tomcat) is not going through the proxy. Problem is solved.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Well done solving it, and thank you for giving a solution; it will be helpful if anybody else has a similar problem ever.

[Rob Spoor]

It's a good thing URL has an openConnection(Proxy) method