Little Tutorials

While developing complex systems lots of failure situations require handling and without proper planning chaos can conquer your code.
A number of simple principles can create order and reduce complexity. And the result can be real software quality. (more…)

Good exception handling doesn’t happen by chance. It is designed and planned and when done properly it is one of the main roads to the software “Holy Grail” – quality and reliability.
But leave it to chance and soon all hell breaks loose. (more…)

UML lost the programmers. There is no doubt about it… in my mind. And when a software design technology loses the programmers it fades away no matter what the academia thinks. This happened because UML was pushed in a direction that most code writers don’t like: it started to look a lot like bureaucratic paper work. (more…)

Let’s imagine a very simple scenario. You are writing an application which would benefit from some user specific customization after deployment. Maybe some of your customers have specific algorithms to be executed in the context of your application. Maybe your application doesn’t solve just one problem but it is designed to solve a class of problems but the number of variants is too high for you to capture at development time. (more…)

The fact that I find flaws in the design of the Java exceptions class hierarchy doesn’t mean I think there is no value in the whole system. Checked exceptions have a positive impact in development. The positive comes from the proactive nature of checked exceptions. They demand attention! And I think this is as much as you can ask from them. Beyond being notified that a problem may happen it is up to the programmer to decide what to do. (more…)

As I said before, I am a supporter of checked exceptions in Java. I think they are a great idea that supports serious software development in the real world. I also think Java’s huge success can be attributed in part to checked exceptions.

But this doesn’t mean I like everything (more…)

Is there something wrong with Java exceptions? Does Java need a fundamental change in this area? Is the proposal to make all exceptions in Java runtime exceptions a solution to a real problem? What if this proposal is the solution to the wrong problem?

While reading about this conflict I started to ask myself questions like the ones above. As a result I wrote a first post meant to clarify my thoughts (more…)