The HTTP client is a transport for use in connectivity plug-ins which can connect to external services over HTTP/REST, perform requests on them and return the response as an event. For each service (host and port combination) that you want to connect to, you must create a new instance of a connectivity chain in your configuration file. To use the service, you send events to that chain, where the events are correctly mapped as described in Mapping events between EPL and HTTP. The response is sent back by the same chain instance, with the configured mapping rules.

Persistent connections to the server are used for multiple requests if this is supported by the service. Connection details to the service are part of the configuration of the transport in the configuration file. Details of the individual requests are configured through the events sent to the chain. The HTTP client supports HTTP version 1.1 and TLS versions 1.0 and above.

The HTTP client is designed to talk to REST services and supports GET, POST, PUT and DELETE operations.