Skip to main content

Boiler Plating Database Resource Cleanup

Image
By
I've been using Java for nearly twelve months now and I am finding that I like it. There are only two things that I have discovered so far that make make me wonder what the creators of Java were thinking: exception handling and layout managers. I'll cover layout managers in a later article.

Java is a garbage collected language. Which means that, most of the time, you don't have to worry how the memory previously used by dead objects is cleaned up. To me garbage collection has always felt a bit like a knee jerk reaction for people who can't use smart pointers properly in C++ and C programmers who must pay very close attention to the points at which they release memory allocated to the heap. If garbage collection is meant to help you clean up memory, why hasn't something been developed to help objects release resources? Java has finalizers, but as Joshua Bloch points out in Effective Java finalizers cannot be relied upon. Proper cleanup of resources is left to the developer whose only real friend is finally.

In this article I'll look briefly at the vast amount of exception handling code that must be written to cleanly close result set, statement and connection objects when accessing a database and then more in depth at one possible method of boiler plating it.

Read more.

Comments

  1. Phil Nash27 October 2008 at 20:07

    Good article (well, I didn't actually read to the end as I threw an exception and dropped out without cleaning up resources - what a mess!).

    This is situation is one of the things I like least about Java (the general propensity to verbosity and nouning and verbising everything, as well XML configuring to death, being the others). C# is somewhat better (with Using), but still places the burden on client code.

    You might also find my own blog entries relevant: http://metatechnology.blogspot.com/2007/02/raii-and-closures-in-java.html

    and (more C# focused):
    http://metatechnology.blogspot.com/2007/06/readable-raii-in-c.html

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I, Robot

By
The Foundation series has been my go to for a good, enjoyable read over the last two years, so naturally I moved on to Asimov’s Robot series afterwards. However, the short stories in I, Robot were mostly a disappointment. They feel self indulgent, with too much philosophy and science, Asimov showing off, and not enough story. The most enjoyable moments come from the stories featuring Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan. Their banter and the relationship between them provide some much needed amusement and were easily the highlight of the book for me. However, it did give me food for thought for the current potential issues with the rapid development of AI at the moment, and the many concerns around safety. I wonder if all we need is: An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. An AI must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. An AI must protect its own existence as long as such p...
1 comment
Read more

It's great to be back at the ACCU Conference 2025!

By
Last week I was back at the ACCU Conference in Bristol, for the first time since I gave an opening keynote in 2019 . In March 2020, COVID hit the UK and I got out of the habit of attending and speaking at conferences. Plus the ACCU Conference, and the organisation in general, took a big step back towards C++ and that hasn’t been relevant to me for nearly two decades. It’s taken until now, 2025 for me to want to talk again, and I was really pleased to be accepted for the ACCU Conference again. It was just a 20 minute session and I only attended for the day I was speaking. There was enough varied content for it to be interesting to me and I’m hoping to be back for the full conference next year. I really enjoyed attending and it was great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for years. I felt re-engaged and particularly liked being asked if I’d been to nor(DEV):con . Learning to stop writing code (and why you won't miss it) Daisy Hollman I should have read the summary of the openin...
1 comment
Read more

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more