When Java fails, it fails with verbosity...

Friday, November 7, 2003 at 5:18 pm

Peter Rukavina

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

Well put.(Ahem, let me check

Well put.

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

Reply

Just follow down the list to

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.

Reply

If Java didn’t give me a

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.