I am so excited about this post! It’s a technical post! With code! I wanted to write this to help others who might find themselves in the same predicament.

This was the issue: I’m writing a DropWizard application. DropWizard uses Jersey. My application needed to take in a POST request and use the post body to make a POST request to a trusted server using HTTPS. But then this error showed up:

ERROR [2015-10-22 20:41:23,405] io.dropwizard.jersey.errors.LoggingExceptionMapper: Error handling a request: 8d10b79e51bbb14d
! java.lang.IllegalStateException: AlreadyConnected
! at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpsUrlConnection.setRequestProperty(Unknown Source)...

After doing a little Googling, I found out that the exception is mislabeled. Jersey shouldn’t be throwing an IllegalStateException. It should be a SSLHandshakeException. Ok, so the question is: What’s the workaround? We need to get Jersey (version 2) to accept a self-signed SSL certificate. This requires creating a class with a method we can call to help build a client with the needed configurations. I created this class exactly as Aleksandr Panzin demonstrated here.

Once I added the JerseyWithSSL class, I realized, “Hey, Aleksandr didn’t explain how to actually use it!” And so now, I provide to you the complete solution! Back in my resources class, I created a client using the JerseyWithSSL method initClient():

import java.security.KeyManagementException;
import java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException;
import javax.ws.rs.POST;
import javax.ws.rs.client.Client;
import org.glassfish.jersey.client.ClientConfig;

@Path("/ticket")
public class Ticket

@POST
public Response createTicket(...) {
    ClientConfig cc = new ClientConfig();
    Client client = null;
    try {
        client = new JerseyWithSSL().initClient(cc);
    } catch (KeyManagementException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    } catch (NoSuchAlgorithmException e) { 
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

// Use client as you need...

The trick was figuring out what exactly the Configuration parameter was supposed to be in the initClient() method. An instance of ClientConfig did the trick. I’m happy to say my application works due to this code! Hopefully, it will help you if you ever come across this error.

Happy Coding!