They have a CircuitBreaker. They don't seem to have exponential backoff. But that seems close to correct. For a networked application, what do you think is safer than retrying with exponential backoff and circuit breaking?
As for which failure handling strategy is safer or what it means to fail safely, in my experience it not only depends on the use case but the type of failure. Certain exceptions, even in a networked application, can and should be retried or recovered from while others cannot. Sometimes retrying is good, sometimes preventing subsequent executions (via circuit breakers), sometimes falling back to an alternative resource. It's all based on the scenario.
[1]: http://jodah.net/failsafe/javadoc/net/jodah/failsafe/RetryPo...
[2]: http://jodah.net/failsafe/javadoc/net/jodah/failsafe/RetryPo...