usgs/earthquake-event-ws-client — pull request #23 by emartinez-usgs (2014-11-13 15:17:20+00:00)
Title: Catching null pointer exceptions so as to not mask the real error.

If result is null, that means something failed during I/O. This could be a timeout or socket exception etc... however if we blindly close the connection, it will invariably throw a null pointer exception thus the original (real) problem is never reported. This prevents such behavior.