httpunit PutMethodWebRequest throws IOException; bad file descriptor - rest

Question

Could someone explain why this httpunit test case keeps failing in wc.getResponse with "bad file descriptor". I added the is.close() as a guess and moved it before and after the failure but that had no effect. This tests put requests to a Dropwizard app.
public class TestCircuitRequests
{
static WebConversation wc = new WebConversation();
static String url = "http://localhost:8888/funl/circuit/test.circuit1";
#Test
public void testPut() throws Exception
{
InputStream is = new FileInputStream("src/test/resources/TestCircuit.json");
WebRequest rq = new PutMethodWebRequest(url, is, "application/json");
wc.setAuthentication("FUNL", "foo", "bar");
WebResponse response = wc.getResponse(rq);
is.close();
}

Answer 1

No responses? So I'll try myself based on what I learned fighting this.
Httpunit is an old familiar tool that I'd use if I could. But it hasn't been updated in more than two years, so I gather its support for #PUT requests isn't right.
So I converted to Jersey-client instead. After a bunch of struggling I wound up with this code which does seem to work:
#Test
public void testPut() throws Exception
{
InputStream is = new FileInputStream("src/test/resources/TestCircuit.json");
String circuit = StreamUtil.readFully(is);
is.close();
Authenticator.setDefault(new MyAuthenticator());
ClientConfig config = new DefaultClientConfig();
Client client = Client.create(config);
com.sun.jersey.api.client.WebResource service = client.resource(url);
Builder builder = service.accept(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON);
builder.entity(circuit, MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON);
builder.put(String.class, circuit);
return;
}
This intentionally avoids JAX-RS automatic construction of beans from JSON strings.