In the late 90s into the early 2000s, there was an entire industry spun up to get businesses and governments off their mainframe systems from the 60s and onto something modern. "Modern", in that era, usually meant Java. I attended vendor presentations, for example, that promised that you could take your mainframe, slap a SOAP webservice on it, and then gradually migrate modules off the mainframe and into Java Enterprise Edition. In the intervening years, I have seen exactly 0 successful migrations like this- usually they just end up trying that for a few years and then biting the bullet and doing a ground-up rewrite.

That's is the situation ML was in: a state government wanted to replace their COBOL mainframe monster with a "maintainable" J2EE/WebSphere based application. Gone would be the 3270 dumb terminals, and here would be desktop PCs running web browsers.

It's good to handle any exception that could be raised in some useful way. Frequently, this means that you need to take advantage of the catch block's ability to filter by type so you can do something different in each case. Or you could do what Adam's co-worker did.

try
{
/* ... some important code ... */
} catch (OutOfMemoryException exception) {
        Global.Insert("App.GetSettings;", exception.Message);
} catch (OverflowException exception) {
        Global.Insert("App.GetSettings;", exception.Message);
} catch (InvalidCastException exception) {
        Global.Insert("App.GetSettings;", exception.Message);
} catch (NullReferenceException exception) {
        Global.Insert("App.GetSettings;", exception.Message);
} catch (IndexOutOfRangeException exception) {
        Global.Insert("App.GetSettings;", exception.Message);
} catch (ArgumentException exception) {
        Global.Insert("App.GetSettings;", exception.Message);
} catch (InvalidOperationException exception) {
        Global.Insert("App.GetSettings;", exception.Message);
} catch (XmlException exception) {
        Global.Insert("App.GetSettings;", exception.Message);
} catch (IOException exception) {
        Global.Insert("App.GetSettings;", exception.Message);
} catch (NotSupportedException exception) {
        Global.Insert("App.GetSettings;", exception.Message);
} catch (Exception exception) {
        Global.Insert("App.GetSettings;", exception.Message);
}

Joe sends us some Visual Basic .NET exception handling. Let's see if you can spot what's wrong?

Catch ex1 As Exception

    ' return the cursor
    Me.Cursor = Cursors.Default

    ' tell a story
    MessageBox.Show(ex1.Message)
    Return

End Try

We've seen loads of bad date handling, but as always, there's new ways to be surprised by the bizarre inventions people come up with. Today, Tim sends us some bad date sorting, in PHP.

    // Function to sort follow-ups by Date
    function cmp($a, $b)  {
        return strcmp(strtotime($a["date"]), strtotime($b["date"]));
    }
   
    // Sort the follow-ups by Date
    usort($data, "cmp");

We all know that 2038 is going to be a big year. In a mere 14 years, a bunch of devices are going to have problems.

Less known is the Y2030 problem, which is what Ventsislav fighting to protect us from.