Re: ISSUE-2 (error-handling): Error handling style [APIs — General]

On Tue, 01 Sep 2009 11:36:12 +0200, Robin Berjon <robin@berjon.com> wrote:
> In other words I'm not saying it's necessarily the hardest, most  
> technical of debates, just that it needs to be decided. Strawmen and  
> proposals welcome.

I'd like to argue for not having a common style. Different problems  
require different APIs and different APIs require different kind of error  
handling. If a problem requires an event driven API you'd use an error  
event perhaps with an appropriate interface. If a problem requires a  
callback API you'd use an additional argument that gets called with an  
error object. If you have a synchronous API of some sorts to be used  
within Web Workers you'd use exceptions. You'd also use exceptions in case  
the "API object" can be in different states and a method gets called in  
the wrong state. Or when a method gets invoked with an argument that  
doesn't meet expectations (e.g. an invalid URL).

I think the easy answer to error handling is figuring out what API is best  
for solving the problem at hand and then looking at prior art.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/

Received on Tuesday, 1 September 2009 09:46:14 UTC