It’s been a while I’ve done a project of the day, but here it is, the fruit of my yak-shaving today.
The problem I was trying to solve today was java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class Xyz. When a Java class fails to initialize, the first attempt to do that causes ExceptionInInitializerError, but subsequent attempts to use that class results in this rather unhelpful java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class Xyz without the chained exception.
This problem has been rpeorted to Java for years, but probably JavaSE people doesn’t understand how painful this is in a large modular system, where the initial exception can be reported in so many places — such as one of the 1000 builds you’ve done today, or in an HTTP response to somebody, stderr, logging, or getting swallowed by empty catch block.
So I wrote a little Java agent that uses java.util.logging to log every ExceptionInInitializerError at the point of instantiation. In this way, even on a server, you have one place you can go to check for all errors of this kind. Through j.u.l, you can write a custom Handler to report errors elsewhere, if you want to.
The number of people who will find this tool useful would be probably small, but I hope they’ll really appreciate this little gem. May Google let them find this page.