Overview

Description

The Google APIs Client Library for Java is a flexible, efficient, and powerful Java client library for accessing any HTTP-based API on the web, not just Google APIs.

The library has the following features:

• A powerful OAuth 2.0 library with a consistent interface.
• Lightweight, efficient XML and JSON data models that support any data schema.
• Support for protocol buffers.
• A set of generated libraries for Google APIs.

The library supports the following Java environments:

• Java 7 (or higher)
• Android 1.6 (or higher)
• Google App Engine

This library is built on top of two common libraries, also built by Google, and also designed to work with any HTTP service on the web:

• Google HTTP Client Library for Java
• Google OAuth Client Library for Java

This is an open-source library, and contributions are welcome.

Accessing Google APIs

To use Google’s Java client libraries to call any Google API, you need two libraries:

• The core Google APIs Client Library for Java (google-api-java-client), which is the generic runtime library described here. This library provides functionality common to all APIs, for example HTTP transport, error handling, authentication, JSON parsing, media download/upload, and batching.
• An auto-generated Java library for the API you are accessing, for example the generated Java library for the BigQuery API. These generated libraries include API-specific information such as the root URL, and classes that represent entities in the context of the API. These classes are useful for making conversions between JSON objects and Java objects.

To find the generated library for a Google API, visit Google APIs Client Library for Java. The API-specific Java packages include both the core google-api-java-client and the client-specific libraries.

Beta Features

Features marked with the @Beta annotation at the class or method level are subject to change. They might be modified in any way, or even removed, in any major release. You should not use beta features if your code is a library itself (that is, if your code is used on the CLASSPATH of users outside your own control).

Deprecated Features

Deprecated non-beta features will be removed eighteen months after the release in which they are first deprecated. You must fix your usages before this time. If you don’t, any type of breakage might result, and you are not guaranteed a compilation error.