SWF Humor

Funny little blast from the (Spring Web Flow) past. Back in 2006 while working on Spring Web Flow 1.0 we needed an exception class signaling a failure to parse a flow execution key. Keith Donald and myself jokingly considered calling it the FuckedUpFlowExecutionKeyException but ultimately settled for BadlyFormattedFlowExecutionKeyException. Indeed, it would be quite painful if a user was presented with a FuckedUpFlowExecutionKeyException stack trace after having accidentally corrupted the key in the URL of his browser. :-)

The joke continued for a little bit with the following piece of JavaDoc that you can find in the Spring Web Flow 1.0 source code:

package org.springframework.webflow.execution.repository;

/**
 * Thrown when an encoded flow execution key is badly formatted and could not be
 * parsed. We debated calling this the FuckedUpFlowExecutionKeyException.
 * 
 * @author Keith Donald
 * @author Erwin Vervaet
 */
public class BadlyFormattedFlowExecutionKeyException extends FlowExecutionRepositoryException {

This was not enough however, a particularly sensitive person actually complained about Spring Web Flow using offensive language! In the end this bit of nostalgia was kicked out in the 1.0.1 release. Still makes for a fun anecdote however! ;-)