Exceptions should tell a story

So I was happily plumbing along to get bean validation to work in AS 5.2, when I got this client side:

org.jboss.serial.exception.SerializationException: Could not create instance of org.hibernate.validator.engine.ConstraintViolationImpl - org.hibernate.validator.engine.ConstraintViolationImpl
Caused by: java.lang.InstantiationException: org.hibernate.validator.engine.ConstraintViolationImpl

For some reason jboss-serialization was looking for a default constructor, which obviously wasn't there.

Now the most recent release showed ConstraintViolationImpl implementing Serializable, so I crossed that out as a problem. (I didn't realize at this point that I was using an old version, but that's not the point of this post. :-) )

Using the JDK serializer gave it away:

java.io.NotSerializableException: org.hibernate.validator.engine.ConstraintViolationImpl

At which point it was obvious that I was using the wrong version.

At the end of the day I only have a complaint about the exception in jboss-serialization. If it said something in lines of: "class is not serializable and has no default constructor" I would have been a happy camper.

So the moral is: always let an exception tell a story.