How to integrate Google reCAPTCHA in Java Web Application With Examples

I never liked Captchas because the burden was always on end user to understand the letters and prove that he is a human and not a software bot. But when I recently saw new Google reCAPTCHA on a website, I instantly liked it.

Because all we need is to check a box and it will figure out if you are a human or robot. Google is calling it No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA experience and it uses an advanced risk analysis engine and adaptive CAPTCHAs to keep automated software from engaging in abusive activities on your site.

google recaptcha

So that formed the basis of this post where I will show you how to utilize Google reCAPTCHA in your java based web application.

Before we move on with our project, first thing you need to do is go to Google reCAPTCHA and sign up. After that you will get a Site key that is used to display the reCaptcha widget on your web pages. You will also get a Secret key that should be kept secret and used in communicating with Google server to verify the captcha response.

After I registered a test site, I got below keys and I will utilize them in my project. Note that while signup you also need to provide domain name and the keys will work only on that domain name. Also keys will always work on localhost, so I can easily test it on my local server.

Google-reCAPTCHA-keys

Now we can head over to our example project. We will have a login page where user will enter username and password, apart from that he will also have to solve reCaptcha and submit the form.

Once the form is submitted, username and password will be validated in our application, whereas we will send the captcha response with secret key to Google reCaptcha server and get the response.

The response from Google reCaptcha is a JSON with a success boolean field, if validated success value will be true otherwise it will be false. I will use Java JSON Processing API to parse the response JSON.

Below image shows our final project in Eclipse.

Google-reCAPTCHA-Java-Web-Application

To get the project skeleton, just create a “Dynamic Web Project” in Eclipse and then convert it to Maven project. Just add below dependency in pom.xml file for JSON API.

Let’s look into each of the components one by one.

View Page with Google reCAPTCHA

Below is our login html page code.

login.html

We need to add Google reCaptcha JS file in the HTML head section and then add <div class="g-recaptcha" data-sitekey="Site-key"></div> in our form to get the reCaptcha widget. That’s all at the client side, it’s really this simple!

Once user is validated he will be sent to below success page.

LoginSuccess.jsp

Login Servlet

Below is our simple LoginServlet.java servlet code where we are validating username and password fields. For simplicity, they are embedded as WebInitParam in the servlet code itself. Note that you need to use Servlet 3 to use these annotations, so you need to use Tomcat-7 or later versions that support servlet spec 3.

Once form with captcha is submitted, we get “g-recaptcha-response” request parameter that is required to send for verification. The last part is the utility class to send POST request for verification and parse the JSON response and return accordingly.

That’s all. Our application is ready, below are the response pages we get based on user inputs.

Login Page with Google Recaptcha Widget

Google-Recaptcha-Widget

Google Recaptcha Validated at client side

Google-Recaptcha-Widget

Response page after server side Google Recaptcha Validation

Google-Recaptcha-Server-Validated

Response where Recaptcha was not solved

Google-Recaptcha-Server-Validated

Recaptcha Solved but user/password didn’t match

Other-validation-error

You can download the project from below link and play around with it to learn more.

By admin

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