I’ve never really had an issue with URLConnection in any release of Java, but I have no reason not to believe your test results (one does wonder what URLConnection can do wrong that it sometimes fails though). I usually recommend using Apache HttpClient for JEE purposes as it is more feature complete, but like any other general purpose API it is of course also automatically bloated and you get transitive dependencies.
URLConnection is backed by non-blocking NIO and a caching layer, both implementations seem to cause problems.
Nope, it works with any eclipse version. Just grab it from the marketplace.
Yah the antrun plugin is pretty handy, though programming in XML is … not fun 
One reason I like SBT, after getting used to its insane internal model, is that you can create commands and attach hooks to existing commands with arbitrary scala code. Gradle is also like that except with groovy of course.
I only use Eclipse’s export function, which uses ANT I believe.
Works great.
Eclipse doesn’t use Ant by default.
Concerning Launch4j, you’re right it only creates a Windows executable. For other platforms you simply supply a .sh file or the jar file.
Is there any way we can get to see said implementation? It would be nice, since URLConnection is a little broke.
Well, I did not own the copyright of my own code, so I wrote a new implementation, just for you 
http://pastebin.java-gaming.org/54a6b5d64 (see github, in next post)
Might I use that? 
@Z-Man: Ofcourse, what else would be the point of this rewrite
I shoved it into github, you can grab the source from: https://github.com/riven8192/http-cache (added support for: HTTP/1.1, chunked encoding, ETag)