Servlet and other websites

Question

I am planning to create a webpage that will take in user input, pass the user input to a 3rd party website's perl script, and take the data output from it and format it into something more user friendly. I need to do this because the 3rd party website refuses to update their script to accomodate us. Changing the format of the output would save us a lot of time.
Is this something that can all be done inside a servlet? If not, is there a way for a servlet to pass the data to a normal Java application on the server, execute it, and wait for a response? I read some posts about application servers. Would that be necessary for my case?
I am new to Java servlets and I could not find out if a servlet could access 3rd party websites or execute applications on the server. Thank you for any help you can provide.

Answer 1

Connect to the URL of the external website and get its contents using something like the following.
private StringBuffer msg = null;
public boolean connectExternal(String urlString, StringBuffer msg){
    //Get the body footer from an external url
     BufferedReader fromURL = null;                              
     HttpMethod method = null;
     HttpConnection connection = null;
     String line = "";
     boolean serverUp = true;          
     try{                           
         HttpState  state    = new HttpState();
         Protocol   protocol = Protocol.getProtocol("http");
         URI        uri      = new URI(urlString);
         method   = new GetMethod(uri.toString());
         int        port     = uri.getPort();
         String     host     = uri.getHost();
         connection = new HttpConnection(host, port, protocol);                         
         connection.setConnectionTimeout(RTC_global.bPEATimeout); //unit is milliseconds
         connection.setSoTimeout(RTC_global.bPEASoTimeout);         //unit is milliseconds
         method.execute(state, connection);
         fromURL = new BufferedReader(
                          new InputStreamReader(
                                    method.getResponseBodyAsStream()));
          if(connection.isOpen()){
              while ((line = fromURL.readLine()) != null) {
                    msg.append(line);
         //Error returned by Cold Fusion server
         if(msg.toString().indexOf("Error Occurred While Processing Request")!=-1){
              serverUp = false;  //Flag to show file is not found
         fromURL.close(); 
         return serverUp;                     
     catch (org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpException he) {
          serverUp = false;  //Flag to show server is down
          System.out.println("Remote host timed out at " + urlString +
                               " HttpException (apache): " + he);
          return serverUp;
     catch (org.apache.commons.httpclient.URIException urie) {
          serverUp = false;  //Flag to show server is down
          System.out.println("Remote host timed out at " + urlString +
                               " Bad URL - URIException (apache): " + urie);
          return serverUp;
     catch (InterruptedIOException iioe) {
          serverUp = false;  //Flag to show server is down
          System.out.println("Remote host timed out at " + urlString +
                               " InterruptedIOException: " + iioe);                         
          return serverUp;
     catch (FileNotFoundException fnfe) {
          serverUp = false;  //Flag to show server is down
          System.out.println("No Item Found - FileNotFoundException: " + fnfe);
          return serverUp;
     catch (IOException ioe) {
          serverUp = false;  //Flag to show server is down
          System.out.println("Remote host timed out at " + urlString +
                               " Bad URL - IOException: " + ioe);
          return serverUp;
     finally {          
         method.releaseConnection();
         connection.close();     
}