After you've successfully created a URL object,
you can call the URL object's openConnection
method to connect to it.
When you connect to a URL,
you are initializing a communication link
between your Java program and the URL over the network.
For example, you can open a connection to the Yahoo site
with the following code:
try {
URL yahoo = new URL("http://www.yahoo.com/");
URLConnection yahooConnection = yahoo.openConnection();
} catch (MalformedURLException e) { // new URL() failed
. . .
} catch (IOException e) { // openConnection() failed
. . .
}
If possible, the openConnection method creates
a new URLConnection
(if an appropriate one does not already exist),
initializes it, connects to the URL,
and returns the URLConnection object.
If something goes wrong--for example,
the Yahoo server is down--then the openConnection
method throws an IOException.
Now that you've successfully connected to your URL, you can use the
URLConnection object to perform actions
such as reading from or writing
to the connection. The next section shows you how.
