Wednesday, August 20, 2003

Checked vs Unchecked Exceptions Lots of talk about checked exceptions vs. unchecked exceptions this week.  Most of it is intertwined, and I believe it started with this Artima interview with Anders Hejlsberg of Microsoft.  The interviewed spawned this discussion which references this LtU discussion. I have ambivalent feelings about checked exceptions.  Sometimes I understand their utility, like when you need to report the file was not found and this is a bad thing.  Sometimes I find them very cumbersome like when I want to write some code that throws an exception in the constructor of a Java class.  One of the keys to living with checked exceptions is determining a propegation strategy.  You have to figure out how you are going to propegate the exceptions up through the layers of your application.  You should figure out when is it important to see individual exceptions and when is it OK to see a more coarse grained exception. In an application I was recently a part of, we built a web application that had several application layers.  The application had a presentation layer, a service layer, and a data access layer.  The data access layer threw alot of very specific exceptions about what was happening.  The service layer caught those exceptions and took appropriate action (if necessary) and wrapped that exception in a higher level exception called ServiceFailureException.  This allowed the presentation layer to deal with a single type of exception and understand that something failed, but present the user with a more friendly error message. 10:19:33 PM    comment []

Knowing and Learning. Some thoughts about knowing, learning, and software design, many of which were thought or written down while watching baseball. (From Jim Waldo's Weblog) [Jim Waldo's Weblog] Great thoughts about the difference between knowing facts about software engineering and knowing actually HOW to engineer software.  Jim wonders why there is no apprentiship process for software engineering. 8:58:23 PM    comment []

Dragongate Technologies has released jSaluki 1.0.1, a small hyperelliptic curve cryptography library for Java published under the GPL.. Dragongate Technologies has released jSaluki 1.0.1, a small hyperelliptic curve cryptography library for Java published under the GPL. Algorithms include [Cafe au Lait Java News and Resources] I've stopped following the cryptography field as closely as I used to.  From my fuzzy memory, elliptic curve cryptography was supposed to be an up-and-comer for public key cryptography.  It was supposed to be faster to calculate than other methods.  Some people have said it's not as strong as some of the number theory methods.  And, I'm not sure how much peer review it has received to date. It's extremely cool that there's an OSS implementation, though.  Hopefully this will spur things on. 3:04:55 PM    comment []

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