Question

I need to connect to the middleware server using
java URL and URLConnection classes .

When googled on to net , i found out some examples
Where the url is ending with /
(http://www.oracle.com/)

URL oracle = new URL("http://www.oracle.com/");

And in some examples the url is without /

URL ur = new URL("http://www.mydomain.com/myfile.gif");

Could anybody please tell me , is that makes any difference , if so
then how ca we choose a URL value ??

Answer 1

Not necessary.

If the URL contain no path section (only has the domain name and its scheme), it may or may not contain trailing slash, i.e. http://www.oracle.com/ or http://www.oracle.com. Both should be accessible. However, a normailzed URL of this must have traling slash.

URL normalization is a convention that allows a URL to be written in a consistent manner. In the URL normalization, the trailing slash indicate that the URL is a directory not a file. For example:

 "http://www.oracle.com/" <- root path
 "http://www.oracle.com/pages/" <- "pages" is a directory
 "http://www.oracle.com/pages" <- "pages" is a file
 "http://www.oracle.com/myfile.gif" <- "myfile.gif" is a file
 "http://www.oracle.com/myfile.gif/" <- "myfile.gif" is a directory

However, this convention is only applied to a normalized URL and whether one should have a trailing slash or not depends entirely on the service implmentations.