While I was doing some failure-mode testing on some code that uses GeoMASON,
I have noticed that ShapeFileImporter.read(URL, GeomVectorField, Bag, Class)
has a problem with its exception handling.

The method declares that it throws a FileNotFoundException; however, it
actually never does so -- the entire IO section is surrounded in a try ...
catch that catches all IOExceptions and prints an error message, but does
NOT propagate the exception back up to the caller. Thus, you get an error
message on STDERR, but then your code continues blithely along.

I would recommend either adding a

throw e;

(which would require changing the method's throws declaration from
FileNotFoundException to IOError) or even just doing without that enclosing
try...catch (which requires the same change to the method signature).

Thanks for thoughts and input!
Matt L. Miller
UCDavis