Hi everyone, I am new to the OpenJDK community and I'm using Java fora small decade now, first as a hobby, then in my academic studies and my PhD in maths, and now as a professional developer in IT companies. I'm quite active on forum to help people, I've helped teaching students in the university, I read a lot of posts on blogs, and so many times I'm facing people having trouble with checked exceptions.
The situation in my current job makes clarifies what I mean. People usually like declaring their own exception super class as "BusinessException", then deriving it in many subclasses to describe more accurate failure reasons. The problem they face is that when they declare their class as *checked Exception*, they cannot use the mechanism of Optional and Stream, for an obvious reason. Usually they prefer Optional and Stream, so they end up by subclassing RuntimeException. I find it so sad because, when interfacing services, you often forget about declaring those unchecked exceptions, and the client is not aware of what's happening! I think you loose all the benefit of the exception mechanism in Java here for a very bad reason. In my job I finally rectified (partially, because the code base is huge) the situation by implementing a "functional" Try in the same spirit than the Optional. People are quite happy with it. I can invest more time in its development but I think this small library could help more people about turning their exception in something clean again. So maybe it could be useful for the whole community. (I already discussed it with my boss, there will be no copyright problem.) There exists similar projects around the world (in the Vavr lib for example) and Scala offers this as a basic feature, which basically means that people could appreciate the enhancement! I am wondering if the Try interface would be interesting for OpenJDK, if they have been discussions about it, and what were the decisions about such a library? In my opinion, it may be a good complement to the Optional and the Stream interfaces to allow a functional style while keeping this cool feature of checked exceptions. Best regards, Justin Dekeyser
