Bulletproof Processing: try…catch

Processing is stable and crashes are infrequent. However, my experience doing performances and exhibitions for IVX has shown me it is handy to add a bit of extra resiliency to sketches. This is especially true when I expect to run for extended periods of time or when the sketch runs largely unattended. The first tip I have is to use a Java try…catch structure inside the draw() method.

Since Processing is based in Java then why not take advantage of Java’s native error handling. A try…catch structure attempts to execute all code within the try part of the structure and only executes the catch block if there is a problem. This particular patterns helps if the errors are transient, meaning that the error will generally go away on its own.

void draw() {
    try {

        // Normal drawing code goes here


    } catch (Exception e) {
        println(“draw(): “ + e.getMessage());
        // Pause for a quarter second. Hope problem goes away
        try {
            Thread.currentThread().sleep(250);
        } catch (Exception e1) {
        }
    }
}

This particular skeleton will catch any exceptions that occur in the draw() method, print them and then pause for 250 milliseconds. That quarter second is usually enough for a transient error to correct itself – perhaps a file loading or some memory becoming available. Either way, the sketch will pause for a short time and then attempt to resume itself. Without this exception handing then any Exception will cause the sketch to stop running.

Note that the sleeping function itself can throw an exception so Java forces us to declare a try…catch block – even though the catch block is empty.

Using try…catch in the setup() method might be useful if the code will be run by others, but in that case make extra sure that error messages are informative. I would prefer that setup() fails outright since most setup() errors are not transient.

So, you’ll see that it does not take much extra code to add a good amount of resiliency to a Processing sketch. Give it a try. Java's website has good resources that take a more in-depth look at exception handling.