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Showing posts from January 3, 2008

Three Rules for Effective Exception Handling

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Exceptions in Java provide a consistent mechanism for identifying and responding to error conditions. Effective exception handling will make your programs more robust and easier to debug. Exceptions are a tremendous debugging aid because they help answer these three questions: • What went wrong? • Where did it go wrong? • Why did it go wrong? When exceptions are used effectively, what is answered by the type of exception thrown, where is answered by the exception stack trace, and why is answered by the exception message. If you find your exceptions aren't answering all three questions, chances are they aren't being used effectively. Three rules will help you make the best use of exceptions when debugging your programs. These rules are: be specific, throw early, and catch late. To illustrate these rules of effective exception handling, this article discusses a fictional personal finance manager called JCheckbook. JCheckbook can be used to record and track bank account activity