Catching versus Throwing Exceptions in Java [duplicate]

Answer 1

Two good rules of thumb:

• You should only catch exceptions that you can actually handle

• Throw Early/Catch Late

There's no hard and fast answer.

In general, you'll probably use "throws" much more often than you'll have a custom "try/catch". Simply because you'll have relatively few "decision" modules that "know how to recover", but you'll have correspondingly "many" modules that could throw exceptions.