When should Throwable be used instead of new Exception?

Question

Given: Throwable is Exception\'s superclass.

When I read texts on writing your own \'exceptions\', I see examples of Throwable

Answer 1

(from comments) The issue that brought this up is that I need to pass an 'exception' to a piece of code a coworker is building if a collection does not get built.

In that case, you might want to throw a checked exception. You could throw an Exception, an appropriate existing subclass of it (except RuntimeException and its subclasses which are unchecked), or a custom subclass of Exception (e.g. "CollectionBuildException"). See the Java Tutorial on Exceptions to get up to speed with Java exceptions.