Is “throws Throwable” good practice

Question

In the past I\'d read tons of code with methods like:

public Object doSomething() throws Throwable {
    ...
}

Is it common practice to do

Answer 1

In some rare cases it is acceptable to throw Throwables. For example, @Around advices in Spring AOP are usually declared to throw a Throwable.

The following example is copied verbatim from Spring AOP docs:

  import org.aspectj.lang.annotation.Aspect;
  import org.aspectj.lang.annotation.Around;
  import org.aspectj.lang.ProceedingJoinPoint;

  @Aspect
  public class AroundExample {

      @Around("com.xyz.myapp.SystemArchitecture.businessService()")
      public Object doBasicProfiling(ProceedingJoinPoint pjp) throws Throwable {
          // start stopwatch
          Object retVal = pjp.proceed();
          // stop stopwatch
          return retVal;
      }

  }

Why is doBasicProfiling declared to throw a Throwable? Because the original method (i.e. the execution join point), might throw an Error, RuntimeException, or a checked exception. So it only makes sense to declare doBasicProfiling to throw a Throwable.