Ebenezer Ikonne

I think the point is that the consumer does not matter if the error has been a Null Pointer, of Null Reference, or whatever. Since the consumer can be any client, developed in any tecnology, located anywhere in the world (depending on your app domain, of course), the consumer does not care about internals of the service. The consumer acts as a 'user' of the service, so don't give him tech details about the underneath.

David: Completely, thoroughly disagree. The assertion that "Users don't care about this information" is just plain wrong. The users of web services are people building applications. In other words, they're technical people. Exceptions speak to them.

Granted, I don't care about the internals of your service. But you're giving me the choice between "Sorry, that didn't work" and "NullPointerException in file com/example/baz/buz/zebox.quxx line 1342". The latter tells me two highly relevant, useful facts:

- It's not my fault.

- You need to be told about it, because it's probably a bug in your software.

And by the way, I can send you an error report that includes the filename and line number of the error.

By contrast "sorry" is just not good enough. I don't know about you, but I hate applications that act that way.