thought on error handling strategy

[Joakim Verona <jo...@verona.se>]

hello,

i was trying to set up tomcat 3m1 for use with the linux blackdown 1.2.2
rc3 jdk. it works fine with jdk 1.1.8
but in 1.2 i get "could not create bean of xxx" where xxx is my own
bean. 

Ok, this might be for whatever trivial reason, wrong classpath etc, but
if i look in the generated source for my
jsp page, i see that the actual bean instantiation exception is caught
and thrown again with the original stacktrace removed. this means that i
cant see the actual cause of the error, unless i run tomcat under a
debugger.

in another system i designed i had a simmilar problem, and there i made
a exception subclass that could contain a reference to another(more
basal) exception. so any number of exceptions could be chained and no
info would get lost when you rethrowed the exceptions from a higher
level. then yo.u could make a nice display of the error whe you actually
wanted to show the user someting

is this something that is proposed for tomcat, or already working except
in my configuration? the "root cause"
exception display seems to be in this direction.

i read some messages about error handling and that they should be more
user oriented. thats fine, but i would also not like the detail to get
lost. 

just a user opinion. i might experiment with adding this feature myself
just to sort my own problem out. (but tomcat seems difficult to build,
as far as i can determine from the messages on this list)


-- 
Joakim Verona
joakim@verona.se
http://www.verona.se/~joakimv