Java Enterprise Best Practices

Making Applications More Robust

The first set of practices in this chapter dealt with how to encode objects that will be sent to another process. This section is very different; it contains practices for making an application more robust. The practices in this section aren’t really about “design” in the classic sense. Nothing in these practices will help you determine the object composition for your business logic or write a better remote interface. Instead, they mostly deal with two related topics: connection maintenance and failure handling.

Connection maintenance refers to practices that make sure the programs in a distributed application can connect with each other and send method calls. Failure handling refers to practices that enable an application to recover as gracefully as possible from a connection failure; you might think there’s not a lot you can do when an application crashes (or starts performing badly), but there are a few simple practices that will help you diagnose problems and provide end users with a better experience.