Why do Java people frequently consume exceptions silently?

Question

I never did any serious Java coding before, but I learned the syntax, libraries, and concepts based on my existing skills (Delphi & C#). One thing I hardly understand i

Answer 1

You would usually swallow an exception when you cannot recover from it but it is not critical. One good example is the IOExcetion that can be thrown when closing a database connection. Do you really want to crash if this happens? That's why Jakarta's DBUtils have closeSilently methods.

Now for checked exception that you cannot recover but are critical (usually due to programming errors), don't swallow them. I think exceptions should be logged the nearest as possible to the source of the problem so I would not recommend removing the printStackTrace() call. You will want to turn them into RuntimeException for the sole purpose of not having to declare these exceptions in you business method. Really it doesn't make sense to have high level business methods such as createClientAccount() throws ProgrammingErrorException (read SQLException), there is nothing you can do if you have typos in your sql or accessing bad indexes.