[rules-dev] Questionable Exception Handling

I was browsing through the drools source code I am not a fan of seeing catching Throwable in any java code ... I see this in class org.drools.util.ClassUtils: /** * This method will attempt to create an instance of the specified Class. It uses * a syncrhonized HashMap to cache the reflection Class lookup. * @param className * @return */ public static Object instantiateObject(String className) { Class cls = (Class) ClassUtils.classes.get( className ); if ( cls == null ) { try { cls = Class.forName( className ); ClassUtils.classes.put( className, cls ); } catch ( Throwable e ) { throw new RuntimeException("Unable to load class '" + className + "'", e ); } } Object object = null; try { object = cls.newInstance(); } catch ( Throwable e ) { throw new RuntimeException("Unable to instantiate object for class '" + className + "'", e ); } return object; } I believe this masks important errors where the application should not continue to run and it would be preferable to crash... --zoly