Thrown when a bug is detected in the plugins code.
This class is intended to be used in assertion statements, similar to the way that java 1.4's native assertion mechanism is used. However there is a difference: when a java 1.4 assertion fails, an AssertionError is thrown, which is a subclass of Error; here, the PluginAssertionFailure class extends RuntimeException rather than Error.
This difference in design is because throwing Error objects is not good in a container-based architecture.
Example:
if ( impossibleCondition ) { throw new PluginAssertionFailure( "internal error: impossible condition is true" ); }
Note that PluginAssertionFailure should not be thrown when user input is bad, or when code external to the Digester module passes invalid parameters to a plugins method. It should be used only in checks for problems which indicate internal bugs within the plugins module.
@since 1.6