In the world of software development, error handling often stands as an afterthought, a necessary evil that clutters code and hinders readability. Error handling is not merely about catching and handling exceptions; it’s about anticipating potential issues, designing code to gracefully recover from failures, and providing informative messages that guide developers towards solutions. It’s about ensuring that code doesn’t crumble under the weight of unexpected situations.

In this article you will explore more about it.

Exceptions

When you’re writing code you want to make sure that the code interacts in an expected way, but sometimes, null can appear, or unexpected values. For that you can use exceptions that catch when something goes out of normal.

Now there are already existing exceptions, like IOException or NullPointerException. But it’s a good practice to have customized exception that catch in a more detailed manner an exception, per example, you have an object, and there’s an attribute not being filled and it’s a required field to create the object.

Or you’re trying to copy content from a file to another, there’s a source and a destination, you need to verify if the files (source and destination) exists, or for example if the fields are empty.

To handle potential errors, you should employ the try/catch mechanism. The try block resembles a transaction in the sense that it encapsulates a section of code that might throw exceptions. The catch block, regardless of what occurs within the try block, must guarantee that your program exits in a consistent state. Therefore, it’s recommended to begin writing code that could throw exceptions with a try-catch-finally statement. This approach helps you establish clear expectations for the code’s users, regardless of any issues that arise during the execution of the code within the try block.