As a relative newbie in the Java world, I am finding many things frustratingly obtuse to accomplish that are relatively trivial in many other frameworks. A primary example is a simple solution for asynchronous http requests. Seeing as one doesn't seem to already exist, what is the best approach? Creating my own threads using a blocking type lib like httpclient or the built-in java http stuff, or should I use the newer non-blocking io java stuff - it seems particularly complex for something which should be simple.

What I am looking for is something easy to use from a developer point of view - something similar to URLLoader in AS3 - where you simply create a URLRequest - attach a bunch of event handlers to handle the completion, errors, progress, etc, and call a method to fire it off.

If you are not familiar with URLLoader in AS3, its so super easy and looks something like this:

private void getURL(String url)
{
	URLLoader loader = new URLLoader();
	loader.addEventListener(Event.Complete, completeHandler);
	loader.addEventListener(HTTPStatusEvent.HTTP_STATUS, httpStatusHandler);
	loader.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, ioErrorHandler);

	URLRequest request = new URLRequest(url);

    // fire it off - this is asynchronous so we handle
    // completion with event handlers
	loader.load(request);
}

private void completeHandler(Event event)
{
	URLLoader loader = (URLLoader)event.target;
	Object results = loader.data;

	// process results
}

private void httpStatusHandler(Event event)
{
	// check status code
}

private void ioErrorHandler(Event event)
{
	// handle errors
}