XOM API for Processing XML with Java

["Francois Beausoleil" <fbos AT users.sourceforge.net>]

I would beg to differ.  Errors should be reserved for things which break
the whole application.  When you receive an Error, we have a catastrophic
failure and we cannot continue.

If a document is malformed, the application can recover by rejecting the
document and/or asking the user to correct the document.  Exceptions are
more appropriate in this case.

Hope that helps,
François

On Wed, 23 Jul 2003 11:18:50 -0400, "John Cowan"
<jcowan AT reutershealth.com> said:
> Elliotte Rusty Harold scripsit:
> 
> > That's a new one to me. Where did you get that idea from?  
> 
> The 1.4.2 Javadoc for class Error says:
> 
> # An Error is a subclass of Throwable that indicates serious problems
> # that a reasonable application should not try to catch.
> 
> Similarly, the JLS says in section 11.5.2:
> 
> # The class Error and its standard subclasses are exceptions from which
> # ordinary programs are not ordinarily expected to recover.
> 
> JFBP is a component library I wrote where the user writes a small glue
> class to
> connect the components; you can learn to write glue classes without
> really
> knowing any Java, more or less analogous to shell programming.  If the
> components are unable to connect at run time,
> the framework throws subclasses of Error to indicate what's wrong.
> 
> > unusualfor a Java program to throw an Error. Errors almost always 
> > indicate a failure in the VM that can rarely be predicted or handled, 
> > e.g. OutOfMemoryError or ClassFormatError. Very few user programs 
> > should ever throw or even handle errors. The contract of error is not 
> > that the programmer has blundered. It's that the VM has failed in 
> > some way.
> 
> Not necessarily.  Loading the J2SE 1.4.2 class hierarchy at
> http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/overview-tree.html (takes a
> looong
> time to load even over a fast wire), I see the following descendants of
> java.lang.Error that don't have those semantics:
> 
> java.lang.AssertionError (this is all about programmer faults)
> java.nio.charset.CoderMalfunctionError (this indicates an exception in a
>   charset decoder or encoder, which is supposed to be "safe code")
> javax.xml.parsers.FactoryConfigurationError (the parser factory given in
> the
>   system properties doesn't exist or is broken)
> javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactoryConfigurationError (same story, but
> for
>   a transformation factory)
> 
> Indeed, it seems to me that the subclasses of nu.xom.XMLException are all
> essentially very like assertion failures, which throw Errors as shown
> above.
> 
> -- 
> Is a chair finely made tragic or comic? Is the          John Cowan
> portrait of Mona Lisa good if I desire to see          
> jcowan AT reutershealth.com
> it? Is the bust of Sir Philip Crampton lyrical,        
> www.ccil.org/~cowan
> epical or dramatic?  If a man hacking in fury          
> www.reutershealth.com
> at a block of wood make there an image of a cow,
> is that image a work of art? If not, why not?               --Stephen
> Dedalus
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Developer of Java Gui Builder
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