An exception is an event, which occurs during the execution of a program, that disrupts the normal flow of the program's instructions. When an error occurs within a method, the method creates an object and hands it off to the runtime system. The object, called an exception object, contains information about the error, including its type and the state of the program when the error occurred. Creating an exception object and handing it to the runtime system is called throwing an exception.
An exception is a problem that arises during the execution of a program. An exception can occur for many different reasons, including the following:
- A user has entered invalid data.
- A file that needs to be opened cannot be found.
- A network connection has been lost in the middle of communications, or the JVM has run out of memory.
Some of these exceptions are caused by user error, others by programmer error, and others by physical resources that have failed in some manner.
To understand how exception handling works in Java, you need to understand the three categories of exceptions:
- Checked exceptions: A checked exception is an exception that is typically a user error or a problem that cannot be foreseen by the programmer. For example, if a file is to be opened, but the file cannot be found, an exception occurs. These exceptions cannot simply be ignored at the time of compilation.
- Runtime exceptions: A runtime exception is an exception that occurs that probably could have been avoided by the programmer. As opposed to checked exceptions, runtime exceptions are ignored at the time of compliation.
- Errors: These are not exceptions at all, but problems that arise beyond the control of the user or the programmer. Errors are typically ignored in your code because you can rarely do anything about an error. For example, if a stack overflow occurs, an error will arise. They are also ignored at the time of compilation.
