NNTPClient

A small Network News Transfer Protocol client library for Java

Public API

• static byte[] readSingleLine(final InputStream inputStream) throws IOException
• static byte[] readMultiLine(final InputStream inputStream) throws IOException
• static byte[] writeAndRead(final OutputStream outputStream, final InputStream inputStream, final byte[] dataToWrite) throws IOException
• static final Set<Integer> defaultMultiLineResponseCodes

Installation

• Coming soon

Example usage

import com.fearnoeval.nntp.NNTPClient;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.OutputStream;
import java.net.Socket;
import java.nio.charset.Charset;
import java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets;
import javax.net.ssl.SSLSocket;
import javax.net.ssl.SSLSocketFactory;

public class NaiveNNTPClientDemo {

  private static final Charset utf8 = StandardCharsets.UTF_8;

  public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
    final String host = args[0];
    final int    port = Integer.parseInt(args[1]);

    final Socket       socket       = SSLSocketFactory.getDefault().createSocket(host, port);
    final InputStream  inputStream  = socket.getInputStream();
    final OutputStream outputStream = socket.getOutputStream();

    final byte[] greeting   = NNTPClient.readSingleLine(inputStream);
    final byte[] modeReader = NNTPClient.writeAndRead(outputStream, inputStream, "MODE READER\r\n".getBytes(utf8));

    outputStream.write("CAPABILITIES\r\n".getBytes(utf8));
    final byte[] help = NNTPClient.readMultiLine(inputStream);

    System.out.println(new String(greeting,   utf8));
    System.out.println(new String(modeReader, utf8));
    System.out.println(new String(help,       utf8));
    socket.close();
  }
}

Example output of java NaiveNNTPClientDemo news.giganews.com 443 (Note: this is not an endoresement):

200 News.GigaNews.Com
200 reading enabled
101 capability list
VERSION 2
READER
AUTHINFO USER TRANSIENT-SSL
205 goodbye

FAQ

• Is this stable?
  • It's currently a work-in-progress
  • Once it gets some use to shake out any bugs, a proper release will be made
  • Once properly released, there will be no breaking changes
• Why is it so small?
  • I was trying to make a prettier/higher-level API, but ran into many subjective choices
  • Instead of making those choices and forcing them on users, I stepped back and decided that in this instance, exposing a lower-level API provided the best tradeoff in terms of usability and flexibility
• Why not use org.apache.commons.net.nntp?
  • There's no mention of bytes in their NNTP or NNTPClient classes, which is required for many use cases
  • There's only mention of RFC 977 (February 1986) in the source, whereas I wanted support for RFC 3977 (October 2006)
  • It was easier to write a ~200-line library that did the essentials than try to understand and update their ~5000-line NNTP package

Caveat emptor

This is a tl;dr. For more details, see CAVEATS.md

• Because of the ambiguity of response code 211, beware of sending LISTGROUP commands with writeAndRead

License

• © 2017 Tim Walter
• Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0