Robust Exception Handling in an Asynchronous Environment

While distributed computing is becoming more and more mainstream, it becomes apparent that error handling is an aspect that deserves more attention. We place ourselves in the context of distributed objects, and we try to hide the network behind the usual remote method call semantic. More precisely, we concentrate on the case where method calls are asynchronous, which complicates the error handling. We start with a state of the art in this research field, and then propose our approach, detailing the problems we faced and how we solved them. Our achievement was to provide the well-known way of handling exceptions using the try/catch construction to programs written using asynchronous method calls. Unfortunately, the usage is not totally transparent because of Java limitations. The main part of the approach is to build an exception mask stack following the Java one.