[java-gnome-hackers] Error reporting

[Tom B. <Tom...@Su...>]

Jeffrey,

The Jackpot project has a project review this Friday which will decide
what I'll be working on going forward at Sun Labs (happily the layoff ax
passed over most of us).  We've been in firedrill mode the past few
weeks, but next week I'll be able to devote more time to the libglade
work and can give you a reasonable schedule.

One general question belongs on your list, unless it's already been
decided:  how should exceptional conditions be handled?  Libglade, for
example, follows the normal C library convention of returning NULL from
its "read and parse the glade file" routine, but doesn't provide any
sort of other feedback to the developer (unless they having logging
enabled and check the log).  Is that the convention for all of
java-gnome?

My preference is to map likely problems to existing or new exception
classes.  For libglade, that includes checking that the file exists
(FileNotFoundException), that it can be read successfully (IOException)
and that it contains a valid XML description (new GladeXMLException).  I
don't want to require a different coding style than the rest of
java-gnome, however.

To make these exceptions more useful, I have almost working code that
"catches" the message logged by the libglade-2.0 library and uses that
the message of the thrown exception.  If exception mapping is chosen for
the whole project, I should be able generalize this code and make it a
common utility function somewhere.

The reason I bring up exception handling is that not having them now and
then changing policies later can frustrate our clients.  I comfortable
with either C-style or Java-style error handling, as long as its
consistent across our libraries.

Tom