Stream Both Character and Binary Data via a Servlet

very programmer can quite easily write a servlet that can perform character streaming of XML or HTML data. As long as the proper MIME type is set before the data is streamed, the process is pretty simple (response.setContentType("text/xml"); sets XML content, while response.setContentType("text/html"); sets HTML).

The following code provides an example of streamCharacterData(), the method for character streaming:

/*
* This Method handles streaming Character data
* <p>
* @param String urlstr ex: http://localhost/test.pdf etc.
* @param String format ex: xml or HTML etc.
* @param PrintWriter outstr
* @param HttpServletResponse resp
*/
private void streamCharacterData(String urlstr,String format,
 PrintWriter outstr, HttpServletResponse resp)
{
String ErrorStr = null;
try{
//find the right MIME type and set it as contenttype
resp.setContentType(getMimeType(format));
InputStream in = null;
try{
URL url	= new URL(urlstr);
URLConnection urlc= url.openConnection();
int length = urlc.getContentLength();
in = urlc.getInputStream();
resp.setContentLength(length);
int ch;
while ( (ch = in.read()) != -1 ) {
outstr.print( (char)ch );
}
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
ErrorStr = "Error Streaming the Data";
outstr.print(ErrorStr);
} finally {
if( in != null ) {
in.close();
}
if( outstr != null ) {
outstr.flush();
outstr.close();
}
}
}
catch(Exception e){
e.printStackTrace();
}
}