Introducing a tiny library for throwing Java exceptions: Cy Young

We have deep open source roots at Launchable. From the countless open-source libraries and programs we use every day to make Launchable run, to my own experience with Jenkins and the Jenkins community. When we have a chance to give back to the community it feels good. Today, I'd like to share a tiny little library that we recently open-sourced for making it easier to throw exceptions in Java.

If you're a Java developer, from time to time you run into a situation where you want to be able to throw a checked exception from a context that you can't. For example, stream processing:

1public void reportData(Stream<Foo> foos) {
2  foos.map(this:report).collect(toList());
3}
4
5
6public Bar report(Foo foo) {
7  // what are you going to do with IOException!?
8  try (OutputStream o = new FileOutputStream(foo.fileName)) {
9    ...
10  }
11}

Man, if only you could throw any exception from anywhere!

With Cy Young, you can throw any exception from anywhere, like the man himself.

1public void reportData(Stream<Foo> foos) throws IOException {
2  foos.map(this:report).collect(toList());
3}
4
5
6public Bar report(Foo foo) {
7  try {
8    try (OutputStream o = new FileOutputStream(foo.fileName)) {
9      ...
10    }
11  } catch(IOException e) {
12    CyYoung.pitch(e); // Cy Young with throw an exception for you
13  }
14}

Handy when you are squeezed between a rock and a hard place. I think about this as "duct tape" that allows you to move on to work on things that really matter.

A little library from the engineering team at Launchable, now available in Maven central:

  <groupId>com.launchableinc</groupId>
  <artifactId>cyyoung</artifactId>
  <version>1.0</version>