That's pretty ugly, although I've seen a lot of that style of coding at my workplace as well. The problem is that there generally isn't anything useful to do on

That's pretty ugly, although I've seen a lot of that style of coding at my workplace as well. The problem is that there generally isn't anything useful to do once you catch the exception besides throw up an error page. You're probably bother off either throwing RuntimeExceptions or wrapping exceptions as RuntimeExceptions.