JavaDojo - Exceptional beta till end of May 2006

M

mfolb

www.javadojo.com has a new killer Eclipse plugin called Exceptional.
Here is their excerpt - check it out.

We are proud to introduce ExceptionalTM - an EclipseTM plugin utilizing
our P2TM Peer to Peer services built on top of Sun Microsystems®
popular JXTATM peer to peer library. Exceptional aims to revolutionize
the way we deal with unexpected exceptions in our 3rd Party libraries.
In working with large teams of developers on large J2EE projects we
began to realize that a great deal of effort goes into tracking down
the cause of uncaught and undocumented exceptions in 3rd party
libraries that are most often caused by misconfiguration or misuse of
the API defined by that library. Once the root cause has been
identified, the problem is often resolved easily, but finding that root
cause often takes hours, sometimes days worth of effort on the part of
the developer. What do you do when your application server or favorite
XML library suddenly throws a java.lang.NullPointerException? We hope
that Exceptional will become your first port of call

www.javadojo.com

Free for beta testing until end of May 2006.

This is what we have been waiting for.
 
R

Roedy Green

www.javadojo.com has a new killer Eclipse plugin called Exceptional.
Here is their excerpt - check it out.

We are proud to introduce ExceptionalTM - an EclipseTM plugin utilizing
our P2TM Peer to Peer services built on top of Sun Microsystems®
popular JXTATM peer to peer library.


That's lovely, but what does it DO? what is it FOR?

Put that up front in any announcement.
 
M

mfolb

Roedy,

It queries the Peer 2 Peer network for the exception if encountered by
anyone else with explanations to assist in solving the issue. Ive spent
days chasing wierd exceptions inside 3rd party libraries and this tool
if it catches on will be a big help.

Martin
Puresolv
 
R

Roedy Green

It queries the Peer 2 Peer network for the exception if encountered by
anyone else with explanations to assist in solving the issue. Ive spent
days chasing wierd exceptions inside 3rd party libraries and this tool
if it catches on will be a big help.

how it is different from the list of causes of exception at
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/runerrormessages.html

Is it just that you dont't need a central librarian to manage the
list?
 
O

Oliver Wong

mfolb said:
Roedy,

It queries the Peer 2 Peer network for the exception if encountered by
anyone else with explanations to assist in solving the issue. Ive spent
days chasing wierd exceptions inside 3rd party libraries and this tool
if it catches on will be a big help.

Does this assume that clients of the program will mark themselves as
being "knowledgeable" of certain types of exceptions?

- Oliver
 
M

mfolb

Exceptional is different in that it uses the JXTA peer-to-peer
technology to allow developers to share knowledge when encountering
real world exceptions specific to libraries and vendor packaged
codebases, instead of generic Java exceptions. It will take a community
of users to start using and populating the data, but its free and
lightweight and if used will be awesome. Its a good use of P2P and
JXTA. I am sick of searching google for explanations on exceptions
thrown from WebSphere, XML libraries and similar, which is where a lot
of my time on integration projects is spent.
 
M

mfolb

Almost, Exceptional uses the notion of the community marking
explanations as relavent or irrelavant based on usage and degree of
value to the community. These explanations that are not of assistance
are sorted to the end of the list of explanations for a particular
exception.

Neat.
 
O

Oliver Wong

mfolb said:
Almost, Exceptional uses the notion of the community marking
explanations as relavent or irrelavant based on usage and degree of
value to the community. These explanations that are not of assistance
are sorted to the end of the list of explanations for a particular
exception.

Neat.

So anyone can submit an explanation, and the other users then rate these
explanations? If so, wouldn't this work better as a centralized web-app
rather than a P2P thing?
 
R

Roedy Green

Almost, Exceptional uses the notion of the community marking
explanations as relavent or irrelavant based on usage and degree of
value to the community. These explanations that are not of assistance
are sorted to the end of the list of explanations for a particular
exception.

The big problem I see is if you have it open to the public to
directly submit. You might get people submitting or ranking
maliciously or incompetently. When you have a librarian in the middle
that helps filter.

I maintain such a list of error messages and exceptions. I suspect
that people would be more willing to submit entries if they could do
it without writing me an email. I could see why the would not like the
idea of going to all the work of writing an entry then potentially
having it ignored or edited.
 
M

Monique Y. Mudama

The big problem I see is if you have it open to the public to
directly submit. You might get people submitting or ranking
maliciously or incompetently. When you have a librarian in the
middle that helps filter.

But there are any number of wikis that rely entirely on public,
unfiltered submissions. It turns out that the community polices
itself, and the whole thing works amazingly smoothly. If this tool
borrows from that approach, it could be good.

The problem I see is that it sounds like a commercial product. People
aren't typically all that excited about commercial products whose
entire benefit lies in contributions by people who have to pay for the
service.
 
M

mfolb

I dont think this type of knowledge would be prone to malicious attack.
There is no point to it. Anyway, there is a lot of evidence from other
public, non-filtered technical bulletin boards and wikis which avoid
malicious content. Anyway, perhaps the company or team behind javadojo
do monitor content? They mention a server side version of the tool
called Harvester which appears to farm the explanations?

I think the real benefit of such tools, is that they embed the
knowledge into the IDE, making the knowledge accessible as an exception
is caught. It avoids the countless amounts of cut and paste into google
I do every day, just to find garbage comments and unuseful explanations
for generic errors inside vendor libraries.

I do however agree that the public nature of these tools, does leave
them vulnarable to attack, however I doubt it would b a problem that
could not be addressed. Im sure its something they have already
addressed for their release in May.

Martin Folb
puresolv
 
I

Ian

This plugin looks pretty cool. The fact that Exceptional is a
commercial product might make it more useful. People who are paying
money for something typically don't abuse it. JavaDojo have a
subscription licencing model which means that you are free to use any
of their tools so long as you maintain an active subscription with
them, and $12 a year seems quite reasonable.
 
O

Oliver Wong

Ian said:
The fact that Exceptional is a
commercial product might make it more useful. People who are paying
money for something typically don't abuse it.

You'd think so, but spammers have to pay their ISPs for Internet access
too. Griefers have to pay their MMORPG monthly fees. And so on.

- Oliver
 

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