protocol for document retrieval

[Mark Brucks <br...@arlut.utexas.edu>]

We decided to see if our application would run under the new JDK1.4
release, and everything is fine except for changed behavior with respect to
Xerces and file retrieval.  In my investigations, I've uncovered the fact
that I don't really know what mechanism Xerces uses to retrieve document
instances that are not local, even for JDK1.3.

We specifiy a file to parse using a URL of the form "file://<host>/<path>".
Using JDK1.3, things worked fine.  In order to try to figure out what was
going on under the hood, I introduced a typo into the filename portion of
<path>.   Xerces fails and generates errors that suggest that FTP is being
used to retrieve the file (Xerces is using java.net.URL.openStream, which
is calling sun.net.www.protocol.ftp.FtpURLConnection.getInputStream, which
is failing eventually on FTP login?).  The interesting thing is that
anonymous FTP has always been turned off on the server hosting the files.
So the question is, how did it ever work?  Does java.net.URL.openStream
fall back to a different protocol if FTP fails?  Why would this behavior
change just because of a typo in the filename?

To further complicate/explain matters, it never works under JDK1.4.
Regardless of whether or not the URL is correct, it always generates an FTP
login error. If it had never worked under 1.3, I would understand -
anonymous FTP is always failing.  However, it did work under 1.3, so it
wasn't using anonymous FTP.  So what was it using, and how do we get it to
use the previous mechanism under 1.4?

Thanks - Mark Brucks

I'm having trouble retrieving the FAQ or gettting previous messages or
message indexes to know if this topic has already been discussed.  I've
also gotten no response from <ge...@xml.apache.org>, but I'm not
sure what response time to expect from that e-mail address.


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