Networking Features and Enhancements

in Java SE 6

Enhancement to Network Interface

Provides a number of new methods for accessing state and configuration information relating to a system's network adapters. This includes information such as the broadcast address, subnet mask, MAC addresses, and MTU size. See java.net.NetworkInterface

The new class java.net.InterfaceAddress encapsulates all information about a NetworkInterface's IP addresses, including the broadcast address, and subnet prefix length (subnet mask)

Support for Internationalized Domain Names

RFCs 3490, 3491, 3492, 3454 define a mechanism where domain names comprised of characters in alphabets other than US ASCII can be stored in the DNS. An algorithm is defined which provides a conversion from arbitrary Unicode strings to and from a "mangled" ASCII form. This feature provides a new class java.net.IDN, which allows applications to do this conversion so that IDNs can be looked up via java.net.InetAddress.

HTTP Negotiate authentication

This adds support for the "Negotiate" HTTP authentication scheme defined by Microsoft. Negotiate allows multiple underlying authentication mechanisms to be supported, and in each instance, one of these mechanisms is chosen for use. Currently, Kerberos is the only supported mechanism. This feature is described in more detail in the guide to Http Authentication.

Cross platform NTLM

Previously, the Microsoft defined NTLM authentication protocol for HTTP was only supported on Windows. Now, this protocol is supported on all platforms.

Default CookieManager implementation

The CookieHandler class was added in 1.5, but no implementation was provided in java.net. This feature provides a simple extensible implementation which separates the storage of cookies from the policy surrounding their acceptance. The default manager provides a number of standard policies and a simple in-memory storage mechanism. User defined policies and storage mechanisms can be used with this implementation. The following are the new classes related to this feature:

Light-weight HTTP server

This provides a simple set of classes and interfaces for building light-weight HTTP server applications. The feature defines two new packages com.sun.net.httpserver and com.sun.net.httpserver.spi. The server supports HTTP and HTTPS.