I'm wondering what the basic steps would be for a Java application on my computer to be able to read a text file from the web given only the URL of the file.
You will use the classes java.net.URL, java.net.URLConnection for that. There is a very nice explanation in the java tutorial. You can find it here: http://web2.java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/networking/urls/readingURL.html