Danny,
Can you send me a Google Wave invite if you have some left over. Actually this applies to anyone else who has Wave invites.

Dennis

Dennis,

I sent you a wave invite.

Tom

Thanks Tom.

Error Handling
I think we should add error reporting and handling to the list of requirements, and we should come up with a methodology early.

I currently envisioned this as optional class or subsystem that stores error messages. It’s an optional class, so that we are not forcing users to use it. We can overload it to do nothing. A class that stores error messages will be useful to us for debugging remotely. If someone has a problem; we can ask them to compile in the error reporting system and send the log file to us. And if every piece of software utilizes it (hence it should be decided before coding), we should be able to figure out quickly what happened. Users could also get a better understanding looking at the error logs.

Error Reporting
This will include discussions on how the software will report errors. Reporting can be either returning JAUS_TRUE or JAUS_FALSE from every function, or throwing exceptions. I prefer the latter because exceptions can report a large amount of data, and it makes the code cleaner by not having to check the return value of functions.

Some of the minimum things to report (things we must discuss) in the exceptions are:
- Layman’s terms of what went wrong: “Divide by Zero”
- Expected Value (if variable or argument)
- Actual Value (if variable or argument)
- Filename, Function, and Line # where the error occurred. I have a good MACRO that automates this, when reporting errors.

Error Handling
The optional class should process the error either by sending it out to a server (syslogd), Write to a non-volatile memory on the system, or do both. If we use exceptions, all we have to do is pass the exception to this class. If the user does not wish to have error reporting, this class will be overloaded to do nothing.


- Dennis

Good point. I like your ideas. Error reporting was something we did well back in the day when we were using this code for the grand challenge. We didn't include it in OpenJAUS because it was very specific to our needs at the time. I agree that we need to have good error management in the next release. The current library is too vague when it comes to reporting what went wrong when there is an error. Let me know when you activate your google wave account and you can add some requirements for error reporting / handling in our discussion there.

My Google Wave account is dmiller3@gmail.com. Still getting used to it though.