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From: Jens Alfke <jens@couchbase.com>
To: "user@couchdb.apache.org" <user@couchdb.apache.org>
CC: Scott <scotty2541@sbcglobal.net>
Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2012 20:02:45 -0800
Subject: Re: Documented API does not work.
Thread-Topic: Documented API does not work.
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On Dec 25, 2012, at 2:01 AM, Robert Newson <rnewson@apache.org<mailto:rnews=
on@apache.org>> wrote:

Scott is right that we should return well-formed error responses and
not stack traces (We're not J2EE, for goodness sake)

Agreed. This seems to me to be an endemic problem of Erlang programs =97 th=
e pattern-matching behavior in the language is extremely convenient but res=
ults in software that handles any sort of incorrect input with a generic ex=
ception like =93badmatch=94. Which might be okay if the software took care =
to catch all of those exceptions and map them into either app-specific exce=
ptions or some kind of error codes; but none of the Erlang code I=92ve seen=
 (mostly just CouchDB) ever does that. One of the few pieces of Erlang code=
 I wrote did carefully try to catch such generic exceptions, but I was told=
 by the reviewer that it was =93not idiomatic=94.

Someone should totally fix this particular bug. But in my experience there =
are dozens of other similar ones in the CouchDB code. Coding in Erlang seem=
s to breed these bugs, the same way that coding in C breeds memory smashers=
.

Yes, I am a little bitter about this. CouchDB has the most absurdly verbose=
-but-incomprehensible log messages. I have spent/wasted many hours trying t=
o make sense of them.

Omitting the leading slash
in the path of an HTTP request line is pretty unusual these days
(because it's mandatory and almost everyone uses a library of some
sort)

Also agreed. IMHO anyone who doesn=92t immediately realize that the path in=
 an HTTP command line must begin with a slash, does not have the expertise =
to be hand-crafting HTTP requests. I=92m not being snooty, I=92m just sayin=
g that there are a lot of excellent HTTP libraries for every conceivable pr=
ogramming language, and the only reason to avoid them is if you=92re an HTT=
P boffin who needs to do something very unusual.

=97Jens


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