Category: java

Gist for snapping current clock in Java.

• Chain exceptions by passing the caught exception as the cause argument of the new exception.
• Messages in exceptions are not chained. I have to do that myself if I want to how something went wrong.
• toString() and toMessage() differ only in that toString() prepends the exception type to what it dumps out.
• Most messages from Java are horribly terse, almost to the point of uselessness.
• Use unchecked exceptions (i.e., subclassed from RuntimeException) when the caller did something wrong with the API; use checked exception (i.e., subclasses from Exception) when the call was made correctly, but something didn’t cooperate properly.
• You have to reimplement all the constructor variations in subclasses, but can basically delegate everything to the superclass.
• Gist to collect the transitive closure of Java exceptions into single message.