Java I/O

Chapter 5. Network Streams

From its first days, Java has had the network in mind, more so than any other common programming language. Java is the first programming language to provide as much support for network I/O as it does for file I/O, perhaps even more—Java’s URL, URLConnection, Socket, and ServerSocket classes are all fertile sources of streams. The exact type of the stream used by a network connection is typically hidden inside the undocumented sun classes. Thus, network I/O relies primarily on the basic InputStream and OutputStream methods, which you can wrap with any higher-level stream that suits your needs: buffering, cryptography, compression, or whatever your application requires.

URLs

The java.net.URL class represents a Uniform Resource Locator like http://metalab.unc.edu/javafaq/. Each URL unambiguously identifies the location of a resource on the Internet. The URL class has four constructors. All are declared to throw MalformedURLException, a subclass of IOException.

public URL(String u) throws MalformedURLException
public URL(String protocol, String host, String file) 
 throws MalformedURLException
public URL(String protocol, String host, int port, String file) 
 throws MalformedURLException
public URL(URL context, String u) throws MalformedURLException

A MalformedURLException is thrown if the constructor’s arguments do not specify a valid URL. Often this means a particular Java implementation does not have the right protocol handler installed. Thus, given a complete ...