· clojure

Clojure: Casting to a Java class...or not!

I have a bit of Java code for working out the final destination of a URL assuming that there might be one redirect which looks like this:

private String resolveUrl(String url) {
  try {
    HttpURLConnection con = (HttpURLConnection) (new URL(url).openConnection());
    con.setInstanceFollowRedirects(false);
    con.connect();
    int responseCode = con.getResponseCode();

    if (String.valueOf(responseCode).startsWith("3")) {
      return con.getHeaderField("Location");
    }
  } catch (IOException e) {
    return url;
  }

  return url;
}

I need to cast to HttpURLConnection on the first line so that I can make the call to setInstanceFollowRedirects which isn’t available on URLConnection.

I wanted to write some similar code in Clojure and my first thought was that I needed to work out how to do the cast, which I didn’t know how to do.

I then remembered that Clojure is actually dynamically typed so there isn’t any need - as long as the object has the method that we want to call on it everything will be fine.

In this case we end up with the following code:

(defn resolve-url [url]
  (let [con (.. (new URL url) openConnection)]
    (doall
     (.setInstanceFollowRedirects con false)
     (.connect con))
    (if (.startsWith (str (.getResponseCode con)) "3")
      (.getHeaderField con "Location")
      url)))

Which can be simplified to this:

(defn resolve-url [url]
  (let [con (doto (.. (new URL url) openConnection)
                  (.setInstanceFollowRedirects false)
                  (.connect))]
  (if (.startsWith (str (.getResponseCode con)) "3")
    (.getHeaderField con "Location")
    url)))
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