Stubblog

Warning: rant follows.

The built-in Exception class in PHP is total crap. It is an inheritance nazi preventing you from doing useful stuff in your own exception classes. Whoever made its get*() methods final and the trace property private did not thought any second about how exceptions may be used or that people need to implement their own stack trace handling.

The reason I'm ranting about this is that I'm currently developing some classes that will interact directly with an application server and I need to map the exceptions thrown on the application server, delivered over the wire to my application, into my own exception classes. Of course the transferred exception contains a stack trace that I want to show within my application.

But I can not create an exception instance and overload the stack trace with that one delivered over the wire and then throw this exception. The PHP exception class forces me to implement another stack trace in my exceptions, but it is nonsense, because if the exception is thrown and not caught and has no proper __toString() implementation it will just show the senseless stack trace from where it was thrown within my application, not the stack trace from the application server. Instead of reusing existing code the built-in exception class forces me to implement my own stack trace handling, overload the __toString() method and rewrite all stuff to display the correct stack trace as it is known from the native stack trace handling. Additionally I have to remind all developers using my exception that they can not call the default methods to get the stack trace but that they need to use special methods on this exceptions. Not to talk about increased memory usage because the exception contains two stack traces now.