Footnotes for A New Era for Java Protocol Handlers

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by Brian Maso

1. Actually, it's quite easy to fashion something like this yourself. Using the Java 2 URLClassLoader and a "launcher" class you can make a network-enabled classpath rather easily. Back
2. Probably a more general and useful solution would have used XML documents instead of DataInputStream-readable streams. However,this is just an example protocol handler, I didn't want my description to get bogged down with ancillary APIs such as the org.xml APIs. Back
3. The Windows registry API does allow an application to look at the registry on foreign machines within a domain.However,machines must be identified by their NetBios name.The URL class strictly requires that any host names provided in the URL string can be turned into a java.net.InetAddress object (using InetAddress.getByName()). Because you can't necessarily do that conversion with NetBios names, my win32registry: protocol handler simplifies things by restricting access to the local machine. Back
4. Consider an alternative example: the mailto: protocol handler. Mailto: URLs don't look like normal URLs, so a mailto: protocol handler implementation must override the parseURL() method and provide an alternative parsing algorithm. Back