java.net.URLConnection.getContent()

[Philip Race]

Perhaps these APIs should be deprecated (for removal) ?

For 30 years, AudioClip has been the only public type that this API 
returned for audio data.
Clearly that won't be possible after it is removed.

SoundClip is the replacement for public uses of AudioClip so it is the 
obvious replacement.
And I can without too much work return a SoundClip, and that offers the 
same migration path
as for direct API uses of AudioClip, so may be it is the best short term 
thing, whilst a longer term
deprecation is worked out ?

-phil.

On 6/14/25 12:21 AM, Alan Bateman wrote:
> On 13/06/2025 23:11, Philip Race wrote:
>> 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 ?
>
> This is a JDK 1.0 era API. The intent seems to be to test the return 
> with instanceof to test for types that the caller can deal with. The 
> 1-arg overload allows the caller to provider an array of the types 
> that it can deal with. Ironically, the addition of pattern matching 
> for instanceof and other work on patterns makes it easier to use.
>
> I did a quick search to see if there is a mapping/table anywhere on 
> MIME type to Java class but don't see it.
>
> In any case, with the removal of java.applet then it can't return an 
> AudioClip, and existing code that expects an AudioClip won't compile 
> or run. Looking at JavaSoundAudioClip then it doesn't look like there 
> are other audio types implemented. I can't case to a SoundClip or 
> other sound types, right? So I think dropping it should be okay, 
> meaning null will be returned.
>
> -Alan
>
>