Handling errors isn’t about sprinkling try/catch everywhere—it's about designing for failure without sacrificing clarity or performance. Here’s a crisp guide you can apply today. 💪
🔸 TLDR
▪️ Treat exceptions as rare, exceptional paths—not control flow.
▪️ Use checked for recoverable cases, runtime for programmer bugs.
▪️ Prefer standard exceptions, document them, include actionable context, and keep operations failure-atomic.
▪️ Never ignore exceptions—handle or propagate intentionally.
🔸 WHY IT MATTERS
▪️ Clear exception strategy = predictable behavior + maintainable APIs.
▪️ Good messages + right types = faster debugging and safer refactors.
▪️ Failure atomicity prevents partial, corrupt state. 🧯
🔸 PRACTICES (DO THIS ✅)
▪️ Use exceptions only for exceptional conditions
Don’t use them for normal control flow or looping logic.
▪️ Use checked exceptions for recoverable conditions; runtime exceptions for programming errors
E.g., IOException (caller can retry) vs IllegalArgumentException (bug to fix).
▪️ Avoid unnecessary use of checked exceptions
If callers always rethrow or can’t recover, use runtime or return a result type.
▪️ Favor standard exceptions
IllegalArgumentException, IllegalStateException, NoSuchElementException, UnsupportedOperationException, NullPointerException (rarely and intentionally), IOException, etc.
▪️ Throw exceptions appropriate to the abstraction
Expose domain-level errors, not low-level leaks. Wrap and rethrow with cause.
▪️ Document all exceptions thrown by each method
Javadoc @throws with when and why. Declare checked ones explicitly.
▪️ Include failure-capture info in the detail message
What failed, the key inputs/ids, and next steps. Keep PII out; include the cause.
▪️ Strive for failure atomicity
On failure, state is unchanged. Use validate-then-mutate, transactions, or temp objects.
▪️ Don’t ignore exceptions
No empty catch. Handle, translate, log once at the right boundary, or propagate.
🔸 CODE SMELLS TO AVOID ❌
▪️ catch (Exception e) {} or blanket catches that hide root causes.
▪️ Throwing generic Exception/RuntimeException without context.
▪️ Logging and rethrowing repeatedly (log once or on a boundary).
▪️ Methods that mutate state before validating inputs.
▪️ APIs that leak JDBC/HTTP/IO specifics through your domain layer.
🔸 TAKEAWAYS
▪️ Clarity over cleverness: right type, right layer, right message.
▪️ Design for recovery where it makes sense; otherwise fail fast.
▪️ Keep state safe: validate first, mutate last, roll back on error.
▪️ Document behavior so callers know how to handle failures.
#️⃣
#Java #CleanCode #ErrorHandling #SoftwareEngineering #EffectiveJava #Backend #Programming #APIDesign #Readability #Maintainability
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