Supporting Maintainable Exception Handling with Explicit Channels

Exception handling mechanisms were conceived as a means to improve maintainability and reliability of programs that have to deal with exceptional situations. They are included in several mainstream programming languages and promote a certain degree of textual separation between normal and exceptional behaviour. Even though maintainability and reliability motivated the adoption of exception handling, several studies indicate that achieve them is difficult in real-life exception handling implementations. Our claim is that this difficulty is caused by the local way in which global exceptions are handled in conventional exception handling models. This book describes an innovative platform- independent model for exception handling, called EFlow, which aims to improve the simultaneous satisfaction of software maintainability and reliability. EFlow is mainly grounded on the notion of explicit exception channels, which support modular representation of global exceptional- behaviour properties. EFlow was concretised by two distinct full-fledged implementations: EJFlow(Java-based) and ESFlow (UML-based).