Should I use java.net.URI or java.net.URL?
Whichever is more convenient. URLs must use a registered URL protocol and cannot handle URNs; there is slightly more overhead in making a URL than a URI, but not much. URI provides better methods for relativizing and canonicalizing URLs as well as other operations on the syntactic structure. To directly load content you need to use a URL. URI seems to have difficulty with the jar protocol.
