Although this question is very old, but I see still there are no exact answer. I will try to answer the question here.
I believe the question in short here is how to set the proxy settings for the Apache commons HttpClient (org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient).
Code snippet below should work :
HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
HostConfiguration hostConfiguration = client.getHostConfiguration();
hostConfiguration.setProxy("localhost", 8080);
client.setHostConfiguration(hostConfiguration);