I second fever's suggestion, especially given the simplicity of getting data via HTTP in Java. The code below is just a toy example of a program that takes an URL as a command line argument and prints the corresponding web page to standard out. This is the most simple minded approach, I'm sure one can do it much better, it's just a piece of code I'd around.

import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;

public class HTTPclient
{
  public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception {
          URL url = new URL(args[0]);
          URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();

          char c;
          InputStream input = conn.getInputStream();
          while((c = (char) input.read()) != -1) {
                System.out.print((char) c);
          }
          input.close();
  }

}
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Just my 2 cents, -gjb-