A few days ago, we pointed here on Artima Developer to an interview with Ron Goldman, where he talks about the importance of writing code that ensures the robustness of an application:

In computing, perhaps 5% of our code deals with exception handling and error correction, which seems like a lot, while 95% tries to get the basic job done. Biology appears to reverse this, with 5% doing the basic metabolism and 95% functioning to make sure that the 5% can do its job.

Java provides a sophisticated exception-handling mechanism, but few developers take full advantage of that facility. A recent article by Tim McCune points out a few common exception-handling anti-patterns, and suggests ways to better handle exceptions. Among the anti-patterns he shows are:

• Log and throw
• Throwing Exception
• Throwing the kitchen sink
• Catching Exception
• Destructive wrapping
• Log and return null
• Catch and ignore
• Throw from within finally
• Multi-line log messages
• Unsupported operation returning null
• Ignoring InterruptedException
• Relying on getCause()