Java Distributed Computing

URLs, URLConnections, and ContentHandlers

The java.net package, in addition to object-oriented representations of IP sockets, also provides objects that support the HTTP protocol for accessing data in the form of addressable documents. HTTP is really an extension of the underlying IP protocol we discussed earlier, designed specifically to provide a way to address different kinds of documents, or pieces of data, distributed on the network. In the rest of this book, we’ll see numerous examples of distributed applications whose agents use customized or standard communications protocols to talk to each other. If there is an HTTP server “agent” available on one of the hosts in our distributed application, then we can use the classes discussed in this section to ask it for data documents using the standard HTTP protocol.

To address a specific document or data object, we use a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), which includes four address elements: the protocol, host, port, and document. The Java representation for a URL is the URL class, which is constructed with a given protocol, host, port, and document filename. Once the URL object is constructed, it allows the user to make the necessary requests to connect to the HTTP server of the data object, query for information about the object, and download the object. The content of the object can be accessed using the getContent(), openConnection(), or openStream() methods on the URL object. Of these three methods, openStream() is simplest. ...