ThreadGroup style exception catcher

[Pho Tek]

Last year, I read about a style of exception handling that uses ThreadGroups. Is this covered in Robust Java ? Is this recommended ?

[Steve Stelting]

Hi Pho Tek,

I'm guessing you're referring to overriding the ThreadGroup method uncaughtException, right? If so, I do discuss it in chapter 4 (Exceptions and Threading) on pages 64-65. I didn't get a chance to talk about the newer feature in JDK5.0 (the Thread's method setUncaughtExceptionHandler) since Tiger had not yet been released when I went to press.

The uncaughtException method can be a VERY effective way to build robust multithreaded code. And of course, it was formerly the only way a developer could address unchecked exceptions in a multithreaded environment. Of course, developers had to subclass the ThreadGroup to implement their own behavior... JDK5.0 has made it a lot easier to associate custom handling behavior with a specific thread by passing an implementation into the setter method mentionedd above.

Best wishes,
Steve

[Alexandru Popescu]

I am currently using ThreadGroup.uncaughtException in a Swing application. I did this in order to be able to present any runtime exception in a nice dialog that will further send us a mail.

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:alex |.::the_mindstorm::.

[Ilja Preuss]

Originally posted by Ali Pope:
I am currently using ThreadGroup.uncaughtException in a Swing application. I did this in order to be able to present any runtime exception in a nice dialog that will further send us a mail.

We do something similar. Additionally, if the caught Throwable is an Error (the method is a misnomer, isn't it), we ask the user wether he wants to shut down the application.

[Alexandru Popescu]

Yep Ilja exactly. Moreover there are a couple of custom runtimeexceptions that requires us to do some clean up behind .

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:alex |.::the_mindstorm::.