Sunday, March 18, 2012

Life and Java both throws Exception

With each passing days we realize " man proposes and god disposes" , well we plan some thing if there is an deviation we called it exception. Exceptions are annoying and we just hate it. More or less each exception holds lots of vital information of reality,  to go forward we need to decode these exception. I have not much idea how to decode the exceptions that life throw, but in Java we can certainly plan it very well.
Java got a one of the advanced way to handle exception. To know more about exception handling framework in java follow this link.

I will focus how to design exception in applications. Designing of exceptions is start right from application design. Every time an error happens or something goes wrong, the ideal way is capture as much as information possible and notify some controller who can take alternate steps in run time. Mostly applications are integration of java classes and they perform the task my calling each other method. Consider if methodA of Class A use methodB of Class B and methodB encounter some error. Obviously methodB will not have any idea what could be the alternate flow. The best thing methodB can do is log the exception. Capture as much information possible about the error and wrap it to a customize exception to report to the methodA, methodA will have idea if methodB fail what to do. It should have the alternate plan ( exception handling block).
Mostly application are segregated into different layers like UI layer,  business layer and data access layer. So if an error happen in data layer business layer can take a decision can another operation is possible to carry out or need to report error to UI.And UI layer decide what kind of message need to displayed to the user.

Its always best practice to use application specific exception which wrap java native exceptions. So that it can contain more information about the error. And logging of these exception is very important. Logs help to track the error and the reason of error which gives the required information to fix the problem.
I hope with this we can plan better for unexpected flow in Java, And guys I need your inputs how to handle exception comes in life.


1 comment:

  1. Here's some guidelines for error handling design:

    1) catch only if you can do something meaningful
    2) if you do catch, rethrow or wrap and rethrow, NEVER swallow an exception, if you don't want to deal with memory leaks later
    3) use application exceptions as error handling mechanism, when not sure how to handle a particular situation.
    4) catch them all in one place - general handler
    5) place that handler as high up the call stack as you can

    ReplyDelete

Thanks.