What is a provider programming?
Regarding this, what is a provider in software?
Provider: Provider is something microsoft "invented" (basically an abstract factory pattern) that is a way of doing a factory of factories, or having a common factory interface which allows factories to be swappable. It is used all over in the MS web stack as a way to keep components configurable.
Consequently, what is a provider class?
A Provider is a package or set of packages that supplies a concrete implementation of a subset of the Java™ 2 SDK Security API cryptography features. The Provider class is the interface to such a package or set of packages. It has methods for accessing the provider name, version number, and other information.
Provider class is used to return the value to which the specified key is mapped, or null if this map contains no mapping for the key. More formally, if this map contains a mapping from a key k to a value v such that (key. equals(k)), then this method returns v; otherwise it returns null.