When Java fails, it fails with verbosity…

Here’s a screen shot of the CBC Prince Edward Island website at 5:00 p.m. today. In the place of exciting news, we are treated to an exciting 17 page (well, okay, it’s only one page) Java error message.

Screen Shot of CBC website showing horrible Java error

Far be it for me to, in my big glass house, throw stones at anyone for having their website show error messages. I simply wish to point out that Java error messages appear, at least to my completely Java-illiterate eyes to reveal absolutely everything but useful information about what went wrong.

I’m just off the phone with Mitch Cormier, the local web maestro, and he says the “web operations guys are on the case.” I hope they have a front end loader to help lift that error message from their brains.

This makes me wonder if what’s kept Java from being adopted by anyone other than weird space-alien like people is simply the fact that it’s so completely divorced from reality. In other words, has Java failed because it has bad error messages?

Comments

padawan's picture
padawan on November 8, 2003 - 00:18 Permalink

Well put.

(Ahem, let me check if this java app crashed again…)

Jevon's picture
Jevon on November 8, 2003 - 05:16 Permalink

Just follow down the list to get to where you need to fix the problem (most of the time). ColdFusion used to do the same.

Al O\'Neill's picture
Al O\'Neill on November 12, 2003 - 03:58 Permalink

If Java didn’t give me a stack trace like the one shown when it quits I’d have to go find one. Sure presenting a friendlier face to a web user might be a good idea, but that’s for the java apache project to implement, not a failing of java itself.

nathan's picture
nathan on November 12, 2003 - 04:09 Permalink

It might not be pretty, but I wish I could get a stack trace like that in PHP. Of course I’d log it and not server it to the users…