How to reestablish the connection after a SocketException

[Ray Clark]

There is a project at work that makes calls out to Facebook.

Currently the code gets a socket exception sometimes. When it does it tries to clean up (code I added), sleeps and then retries. Problem is, it continues to get a socket exception so the clean up isn't working. The program finally gives up but subsequent runs of the program (it's cronned) work. I haven't used httpGet and httpClient before, does anyone have any advice on how to clean things up and reestablish the connection?

This is what the code looks like right now:

	public String getJSONWithURL(String url) throws Exception {
		GetMethod httpget = null;
		try {
			String _url = makeURL(url);
			
			httpget = new GetMethod(_url);
			int httpResponseCode = 0;
			int count = 0;
			do {
				try {
					count_overall_calls++;
					httpResponseCode  = httpClient.executeMethod(httpget);
				} catch (SocketException e) {
					httpResponseCode = 1;
					log.error("Received SocketException", e);

					// TODO my attempt at trying to rebuild the httpClient object
					log.error("Resetting the httpClient and httpget objects");
					httpget.abort();
					httpget = new GetMethod(_url);
					httpClient = new HttpClient();
					httpClient.getParams().setCookiePolicy(CookiePolicy.RFC_2109);
				}
				if (httpResponseCode != 200) {
					log.error("Received error code "+httpResponseCode);
					Thread.sleep(10000);
				}
				if (httpResponseCode == 500 && count >= 1) {
					access_token = "";
					URI uri = new URI(makeURL(url),false);
					httpget.setURI(uri);
				}
			} while (count++  < 10 && (httpResponseCode == 500 || httpResponseCode == 403 || httpResponseCode == 1));

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks