In Tiger, java.net introduced new apis, and the deployment products (Java Web Start and Java Plug-in) used them, to implement dynamic processing of auto-proxy scripts (pac files). This ment that when a URLConnection is made, the auto-proxy script could be processed with that URL to find the best available proxy. (On Windows, this uses the javascript engine from IE).

With previous versions of java, there are no such API's to provide the dynamic interpretation, but we could implement static interpretation, using (again on Windows) the IE javascript engine to determine the best proxy for a static url (such as "http://java.sun.com"), and then use that proxy for all connections.
This would be an improvment on the current code (in Java Web Start 1.4.2), which only reads the pac file looking for the first instance of the word "PROXY", and then shows a dialog to the user suggesting he accept this proxy as a manual configuration.
###@###.### 10/29/04 14:30 GMT