Exception thrown at the constructor

Question

Does that mean the class cannot be statically initialized like this:
class B {
public static final A a = new A("aaa");
while
class A {
public A(String _a) throws Exception {
I see no way out. Any idea?
Thx

Answer 1

I'm unable to produce the behavior you're talking about. The Exceptions get reported in both static and instance initializer blocks.Whoops. I lie. ExceptionInInitializerError gets thrown on first reference to the class. Only on subsequent references is NoClassDefFoundErrors thrown.
The scenario where I usually see it is this : some non-critical path in a big system references a class first, fails in the initializer, logs a warning and aborts. Then a critical path tries to use the same class, bombs with a NoClassDefFoundError and leaves everyone scratching their heads ("but I can see it, it is there").
You could say that better programming discipline would ensure that the problem got reported as fatal earlier on, with an informative ExceptionInInitializerError. In reality this often does not happen. This is the reason I dislike complex static initializers.