java.net.URLConnection.getContent()

[Philip Race]

java.net.URLConnection has
public Object getContent();

It uses the desktop module to find handlers for image and audio data

Briefly, the desktop module
     "provides java.net.ContentHandlerFactory with
         sun.awt.www.content.MultimediaContentHandlers;"

That knows about several audio and image mime types.

And URLConnection passes a mimetype string to the ContentHandlerFactory

If it is one of the mimetypes known to the desktop provider 
URLConnection gets returned one of
URLImageSource
java.awt.Image
java.applet.AudioClip

But the return type of getContent() is just java.lang.Object and nothing 
is specified.

How does anything use this API ?

The reason this comes up is that when removing the Applet API, this 
needs to transition to something
other than AudioClip - but who would notice if it got back null instead 
? Or just a byte[] of the raw data ?
Or something else ?

Is this API actually used ? Or useful ?

-phil