Reading HttpURLConnection InputStream - manual buffer or BufferedInputStream?

Question

When reading the InputStream of an HttpURLConnection, is there any reason to use one of the following over the other? I've seen both used in examples.

Manual Buffer:

while ((length = inputStream.read(buffer)) > 0) {
    os.write(buf, 0, ret);
}

BufferedInputStream

is = http.getInputStream();
bis = new BufferedInputStream(is);
ByteArrayBuffer baf = new ByteArrayBuffer(50);

int current = 0;
while ((current = bis.read()) != -1) {
     baf.append(current);
}

EDIT I'm still new to HTTP in general but one consideration that comes to mind is that if I am using a persistent HTTP connection, I can't just read until the input stream is empty right? In that case, wouldn't I need to read the message length and just read the input stream for that length?

And similarly, if NOT using a persistent connection, is the code I included 100% good to go in terms of reading the stream properly?

Answer 1

I talk about a good way to do it on my blog in a post about using JSON in android. http://blog.andrewpearson.org/2010/07/android-why-to-use-json-and-how-to-use.html. I will post the relevant part of the relevant post below (the code is pretty generalizable):

InputStream in = null;
String queryResult = "";
try {
     URL url = new URL(archiveQuery);
     HttpURLConnection urlConn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
     HttpURLConnection httpConn = (HttpURLConnection) urlConn;
     httpConn.setAllowUserInteraction(false);
     httpConn.connect();
     in = httpConn.getInputStream();
     BufferedInputStream bis = new BufferedInputStream(in);
     ByteArrayBuffer baf = new ByteArrayBuffer(50);
     int read = 0;
     int bufSize = 512;
     byte[] buffer = new byte[bufSize];
     while(true){
          read = bis.read(buffer);
          if(read==-1){
               break;
          }
          baf.append(buffer, 0, read);
     }
     queryResult = new String(baf.toByteArray());
     } catch (MalformedURLException e) {
          // DEBUG
          Log.e("DEBUG: ", e.toString());
     } catch (IOException e) {
          // DEBUG
          Log.e("DEBUG: ", e.toString());
     }
}