I don't get what is wrong with that, other than in the try - catch block in the init() method the Exception e is stubbed, i.,e., a stack trace or whatever is not printed. I know that is bad. Is that the main problem? Other than that, it looked like perfectly valid code to me, though admittedly I know C better than I know Java. Don't get me wrong - I believe you that there are valid concerns, it's just that personally I don't see them, other than the issue with the try - catch block.