0.38: What are URL providers and URLs? (brief description)

A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is an identifier that points to a resource that is accessible electronically, such as a file in a directory on a machine on a network or documents stored in databases. An example is http://www.ibm.com.

A URL provider implements the functionality for a particular URL protocol, such as HTTP. It is a pair of classes that extend java.net.URLStreamHandler and java.net.URLConnection.