Earlier today Seth (@CapedCoder) mentioned something on Twitter that I thought was a bit odd. He was looking for a way to disable try/catch functionality for dev versus production. Basically, "Don't try/catch in dev." This led to a few emails back and forth where I made the assertion that I thought he was using try/catch wrong. Not being the end all of things - and knowing I have smart people here - and knowing that this question was bigger than ColdFusion, I thought it would be a great topic of conversation for the blog. So - let's get to it.

First off - technically - there is no real way to just disable try/catch. You could, though, do something like this:

<cftry> <cfset makeLemonadeOutofCrap()> <cfcatch> <cfif application.isDev> <cfrethrow> </cfif> Sorry - unable to perform this action. </cfcatch> </cftry>

It requires more work than simply "disabling" cftry, but it does fit the bill for the request. However, I think this is bad approach and I think it comes down to the cases where we need global exception handling (via cferror, onError, etc) versus try/catch. In my mind, they are two very different things:

• Try/Catch should be used in cases where you expect an error and have no possible way to work around it. Your code basically says, "There is no way I can possibly know this is going to run safe, and I expect it mail fail, so please be ready for an error."
• On the flip side, Global Error handling is for the unexpected error. It's the side cases you didn't test for. (You did test, right?) It's the guy messing with URL parameters trying to force an error.

In the try/catch scenario, you expect an error and should/could handle the error in a nice way. But as it is expected, why would you do anything different for development versus production? You certainly wouldn't want to force a new exception as that's not how your application runs in production, and in general, you want things to be as similar as possible.

I really thought I had a bit more to say here - but I think I'm out of ideas. Mainly his approach just "felt" wrong, but I'd love to hear what others think. And again - I don't see this as a ColdFusion question at all. I'd assume you could apply the same thinking to PHP, Ruby, etc.