Designing Production-Ready Exception Handling in Spring Boot

A basic Spring Boot @RestControllerAdvice that returns raw exception messages can work for small applications but becomes problematic as systems grow. Relying on message text is fragile, since changes can silently break consumers, and generic handlers treat business conflicts, validation errors, and infrastructure failures alike. Exposing raw messages can also leak internal details. The author proposes a structured error response with a stable code, category, retryable flag, trace identifiers, origin metadata, and optional details, so clients can act on failures without parsing text. The approach is explored through NERV Exception, an open-source Java and Spring Boot library, and the article discusses design principles and production trade-offs.
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