Re: Choosing not to throw exceptions like IllegalArguementException

From:
Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Fri, 06 Jun 2008 08:22:31 -0700
Message-ID:
<g2bkns$4f3$1@ihnp4.ucsd.edu>
Robert wrote:

Patricia Shanahan a ?crit :

....

The worse problem is that the error may not even get logged or noticed,
preventing debug from happening at all. At the best, it indeed seems
like a recipe for converting easily debugged problems into subtle wrong
answer problems.


It's harder to debug, but it worth it for GUI code i think


But does it improve even GUI code?

First consider what happens with exceptions. It should be possible to
organize the deployment so that any uncaught Throwable or hang causes a
restart of the application. From the point of view of the end user, the
screen stops working for a few seconds and then goes back to the initial
page. The event is visible to the people managing the application, and
gets logged with information such as the exception stack trace.

If the application is competently supported, something that causes that
sort of log entry should get fixed quickly. Even if the log does not
give enough data for immediate resolution, it gives enough information
to enable instrumentation of the method that threw the exception and its
caller.

On the other hand, consider the silent wrong answer case. End users make
vague reports about the application doing something other than what it
was told to do. Often, the end users will not realize there is anything
wrong until some time afterwards. The people managing the application
may not even realise there is a bug, but end start feeling the site is
flaky and avoiding it.

Patricia

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