Java Language Tutorial 6 Exception and difference between final finalize and finally

This tutorial is made for learning about the Exception and classes to handle Exception of Java Programming Language.

What Is an Exception?

The term exception is shorthand for the phrase "exceptional event."

Definition: 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.

After a method throws an exception, the runtime system attempts to find something to handle it. The set of possible "somethings" to handle the exception is the ordered list of methods that had been called to get to the method where the error occurred.

The runtime system searches the call stack for a method that contains a block of code that can handle the exception. This block of code is called an exception handler. The search begins with the method in which the error occurred and proceeds through the call stack in the reverse order in which the methods were called. When an appropriate handler is found, the runtime system passes the exception to the handler. An exception handler is considered appropriate if the type of the exception object thrown matches the type that can be handled by the handler.

The exception handler chosen is said to catch the exception. If the runtime system exhaustively searches all the methods on the call stack without finding an appropriate exception handler, as shown in the next figure, the runtime system (and, consequently, the program) terminates.

Exception

1. Exception
2. ClassNotFoundException
3. FileNotFoundException
4. ArithmeticException
5. NULLPointerException
6. IOException
7. ArrayIndexOutofBoundException
8. StringIndexOutofBoundException
9. InterruptedException
10. NumberFormatException
11. StackOverflowException

Exception Handling Keywords
Java provides specific keywords for exception handling purposes, we will look after them first and then we will write a simple program showing how to use them for exception handling.
throw – We know that if any exception occurs, an exception object is getting created and then Java runtime starts processing to handle them. Sometime we might want to generate exception explicitly in our code, for example in a user authentication program we should throw exception to client if the password is null. throw keyword is used to throw exception to the runtime to handle it.
throws – When we are throwing any exception in a method and not handling it, then we need to use throws keyword in method signature to let caller program know the exceptions that might be thrown by the method. The caller method might handle these exceptions or propagate it to it’s caller method using throws keyword. We can provide multiple exceptions in the throws clause and it can be used with main() method also.
try-catch – We use try-catch block for exception handling in our code. try is the start of the block and catch is at the end of try block to handle the exceptions. We can have multiple catch blocks with a try and try-catch block can be nested also. catch block requires a parameter that should be of type Exception.
finally – finally block is optional and can be used only with try-catch block. Since exception halts the process of execution, we might have some resources open that will not get closed, so we can use finally block. finally block gets executed always, whether exception occurred or not.

Difference among Final, Finalize and Finally

Final: Final is used to make any class or method final. Final class can’t be inherited by any other class and final method can’t be override in its derived class.

Finalize: Finalize is used as destructor in Java.

Finally: Finally is used in Exception Handling.