The first four of these examples are taken, sometimes with minor modifications, from Advanced Java: Internet Applications, 2nd edition, by Art Gittleman.

ShowURL

This is an applet that causes the browser to go to a new page and display it. The URL of the new page is given as a parameter to the applet. Here is the most significant part of the code:

     URL url = new URL(getParameter("url"));
     getAppletContext().showDocument(url); 

Note that this program only works in a browser, not in appletviewer, because appletviewer does not have the ability to display a document. Attempting to run it from Eclipse causes Eclipse to crash.

Source code: ShowURL.java, RunShowURL.html

TryURL

This is an application that goes to the given URL (given as a parameter on the command line), and prints out what is returned by the server. The most significant part of the code is opening an input stream from the given URL.

     URL url = new URL(args[0]);
     input = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(url.openStream())); 

To execute this program from within Eclipse, select Run -> Run... -> Arguments and enter a URL into the Program Arguments field.

Source code: TryURL.java

GetResponses

This application sends a URL to the server, then prints out the HTTP header that is returned. Significant code is:

     URLConnection c = url.openConnection();
     . . .
     key = c.getHeaderFieldKey(n);
     value = c.getHeaderField(n);

Example output:

Status line: 
	HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Response headers: 
	Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2007 16:35:10 GMT
	Server: Apache
	Last-Modified: Mon, 02 Jul 2007 19:15:02 GMT
	ETag: "19005f3-3b70-a5489980"
	Accept-Ranges: bytes
	Content-Length: 15216
	Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=200
	Connection: Keep-Alive
	Content-Type: text/html

Source code: GetResponses.java

TryURLConnect

This application uses URLConnection methods to set the acceptable MIME type, and to display selected results. There are two arguments on the command line: the URL, and the MIME type. Significant code is:

     URLConnection c = url.openConnection();
     String mimeType = args[1];
     c.setRequestProperty("accept", mimeType)
     . . .
    System.out.println("Content type: " + c.getContentType());
    System.out.println("Content length: " + c.getContentLength());
    System.out.println("Length using getHeaderField: " + c.getHeaderField("Content-length")); 

     Content type: text/html
     Content length: 15216
     Length using getHeaderField: 15216

SimpleWebBrowser

This application is taken, with some modifications, from a program by Elliott Rusty Harold (see http://www.cafeaulait.org/slides/sd2000east/webclient/Web_Client_Programming_with_Java.html).

Just as in ShowURL, this application displays a web page, but this time putting it in a JEditorPane. The setPage method can take, as a parameter, either a String representation of a URL, or a URL object.

     jep = new JEditorPane();
     jep.setPage(initialPage);
     jep.setPage(url);

In addition, SimpleWebBrowser can follow hyperlinks. To accomplish this, the JEditorPane must be made non-editable, and a HyperlinkListener must be added to it. This example uses an anonymous inner class for the HyperlinkListener, like so:

        jep.addHyperlinkListener(new HyperlinkListener() {
            public void hyperlinkUpdate(HyperlinkEvent evt) {
                if (evt.getEventType() == HyperlinkEvent.EventType.ACTIVATED) {
                    try {
                        jep.setPage(evt.getURL());
                    }
                    catch (Exception e) {
                        e.printStackTrace();
                    }
                }
            }
        });