Upgrading to PHP 5

The Benefits of Exceptions

Nothing demonstrates the benefits of exceptions more than the previous section. Any time you can improve upon a piece of code and reduce the overall number of lines, it’s a great change.

Another major boon from exceptions is that they “bubble up.” When an exception isn’t caught in the method it is thrown, the exception moves up a level in the call stack. In other words, the method that called the method gets a chance to handle the exception. This process continues until either the exception is finally caught or you’re back in the top level. For example:

function createAddressBook( ) {
    $version = '1.0';
    $element = 'address-book';
    
    $dom = new DOMDocument($version);
    $ab = new DOMElement($element);
    $ab = $dom->appendChild($ab);

    return $dom;
}

try {
    $ab = createAddressBook( );
} catch (DOMException $e) {
    print $e;
}

Since createAddressBook( ) doesn’t catch the exceptions it generates, the exceptions flow back up a level and can be caught in the try/catch block that wraps around the call to createAddressBook( ).

This behavior makes exceptions particularly well-suited for large-scale applications and frameworks. Without exceptions, you’re forced to check the return value of every method, even at the relatively high level of development that occurs when you’re combining full-blown objects.

However, at that point in your code, checking return values is not always useful, because there’s very little you can do about a problem you discover. By the time ...