Always throw an Exception (never a Throwable). You generally don’t catch Throwable either, but you can. Throwable is the superclass to Exception and Error, so you would catch Throwable if you wanted to not only catch Exceptions but Errors, that’s the point in having it. The thing is, Errors are generally things which a normal … Read more
By catching Throwable it includes things that subclass Error. You should generally not do that, except perhaps at the very highest “catch all” level of a thread where you want to log or otherwise handle absolutely everything that can go wrong. It would be more typical in a framework type application (for example an application … Read more
throws : Used when writing methods, to declare that the method in question throws the specified (checked) exception. As opposed to checked exceptions, runtime exceptions (NullPointerExceptions etc) may be thrown without having the method declare throws NullPointerException. throw: Instruction to actually throw the exception. (Or more specifically, the Throwable). The throw keyword is followed by … Read more
Errors should not be caught or handled (except in the rarest of cases). Exceptions are the bread and butter of exception handling. The Javadoc explains it well: An Error is a subclass of Throwable that indicates serious problems that a reasonable application should not try to catch. Most such errors are abnormal conditions. Look at … Read more
You need to be as specific as possible. Otherwise unforeseen bugs might creep away this way. Besides, Throwable covers Error as well and that’s usually no point of return. You don’t want to catch/handle that, you want your program to die immediately so that you can fix it properly.