A GET request was originally envisioned as a request for a file at a path. `http://host/get/this/thing.data` The requestor decides what to do (give me this file), the host obeys.

Nowadays we understand GET requests as abstract. The requestor makes a request, but it is the host who decides what to do with it: forward it somewhere else, emit an error, dynamically generate the content, return a real file, serialize and cache the request, etc. The client doesn't know and can't know what the server does.

Notice in particular that hosts are expected to handle arbitrary URLs sensibly.

Java has no support for this, but Ruby and ObjC have these sort of facilities: forwarding, dynamic replies, etc. It's up to the libraries to make good use of it.