Here we go, another Java vs. Python comparison (I just can't help myself). This time it's about standard library usefulness in doing certain tasks. Fetching the contents of a URL should be a trivial one, but in Java, it's not. Especially if the contents of that URL are gzipped and use a nice charset such as UTF-8.
Java:
URL url = new URL("http://www.example.com/");
URLConnection conn =