I am using httpclient to connect to a remote server. Now for each primary server there's also a backup failover server that i must talk to if connection attempts with the primary server fails. To achieve this what i'd ideally like to do is have HttpClient use a custom factory that tries to create a socket connection with the primary server and if that fails (or times out), it'll go about talking to backup server (and retry a few times before giving up altogether).
Now, searching on the web, i did find references to a MultiHomeProtocolSocketFactory (that extends DefaultSocketFactory) that is presumably in apache contrib package. But what that does is that in the overriden createSocket method, it takes host as a param (among other thing) and then simply does a InetAddress.getAllByName which is not what i want. From what i understand this caters to a DNS based failover which is not the case here. What i'd ideally like to do is create a factory and have a createSocket method that takes primary and secondary host and port as args and then tries both. I am not sure though how can i make HttpConnection class invoke my method.
