Greetings:

Not too often do I get personally involved in Java/J2EE disputes among those who are virtually experts at this game.  However, exceptions is one of my pet peeves.  NOT catching an exception shows a bit of disregard for the integrity of the product itself and, IMHO, everything should be in a try / catch block such that the exception is NOT caught only in trivial circumstances.  (And if it's so trivial that it doesn't need a try/catch block, is it necessary at all?)

As an old C programmer (yes, there are still a few of us around) if we thought that we were really, really good programmers we would run "lint" on our program before sending it to QA.  And QA always ran "lint" just for the fun of showing up our poor programming.  It was usually an humbling experience.  Catching all of the exceptions during testing should be required.  Catching all of the exceptions during run time is debatable.  I would think that NOT catching exceptions is what makes for run time problems that could have been caught during compile/design time.

The final question is WHAT to do with a caught exception?  This is where experience shows up and with some you can just toss an error statement in a log somewhere with a warning.  Others require an error routine and stopping the program.  Then that becomes a matter of judgement.  Catch and release?  Nahhh...  I only fish to eat, not for sport. :-)

Just two cents.

SDG
James Owen
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On Dec 12, 2008, at 10:30 AM, Greg Barton wrote:

I vote for runtime exception.  That gives you the option of catching it or not.  Just from experience I can't tell you how nice it was when HibernateException went from a checked to an unchecked exception.

That being said, the API methods that can throw it should still declare it in the throws clause, even if it's a runtime exception.  That helps IDEs like Eclipse wrap method calls in the right try/catch blocks when generating code.  (See the "Source->Surround With->try/catch block" menu option)

--- On Fri, 12/12/08, Zoltan Farkas <zoly@daxtechnologies.com> wrote:

From: Zoltan Farkas <zoly@daxtechnologies.com>
Subject: RE: [rules-dev] Drools API improvement sugestion
To: "Rules Dev List" <rules-dev@lists.jboss.org>
Date: Friday, December 12, 2008, 10:10 AM
From my point of view as a developer who writes code
against the api,
I have to handle to case of a Resource not being there, or
being
invalid/corupt... theese are casses that I need to recover
from in my
code...
and I have no way of knowing what do I need to catch and
where, without
first writing the code, run tests against it, and examine
stack traces.
I find this quite inefficient...

If you google for ResourceNotFoundException, you will find
out that
there is quite a few APIs out there that implement it.
There is other
apis that have InvalidResourceException... or
javx.resource.ResourceException

My preference would be toward catched Exceptions in this
case.

--zoly


________________________________

From: rules-dev-bounces@lists.jboss.org
[mailto:rules-dev-bounces@lists.jboss.org] On Behalf Of
Mark Proctor
Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2008 8:04 PM
To: Rules Dev List
Subject: Re: [rules-dev] Drools API improvement sugestion


Zoltan Farkas wrote:

Based on current implementation, the following methods I
think
should throw a exception, something like:
ResourceNotFoundException

do you want this as runtime or catched exception? At the
moment we are
trying to avoid catched exceptions.

Mark



org.drools.compiler.PackageBuilder.addKnowledgeResource()
org.drools.builder.impl.KnowledgeBuilderImpl.add()

another option might be to verify the validity of a
Resource
object at creation time and make ResourceFactory factory
methods throw
ResourceNotFoundException.

I believe the case of a "not found resource" the
user of the api
should be "ecouraged" to handle.

Another case that might be needed to be handled could be
InvalidResource?

Let me know what you guys think

Regards

--zoly

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