Throws Throwable

Looking at badly written code usually pisses me off. That's simple, and true for most people who probably have to read it. There's this one class that I am going through so that I can try and figure out how they used JavaMail and every method they have looks like this:

public void methodName() throws Throwable

Ahhhggg!!! And they just catch Throwable at different points. I have no idea what exceptions they are using and it's very hard to figure out how things are supposed to go. Exceptions and errors are definally something that I will have to work at. I think that when I was working on audioman I used exceptions all the time after checking pramaters etc. I don't think that was a smart idea for methods in a class. From what I was reading in Effective Java, you should use asserts on non-public methods. That's smart, but I just don't know how to test that sort of thing. I always thought of asserts to test the state of an object, but they also have things like IllegalStateException (since 1.1). I don't know when asserts came in, but I think that they are newer than Junit. In a way, it's starting to be a bit of a mess, but I can see why they are going to have a hard time in getting rid of things like that. We'll see how well they are going to be at making the language nice and lean. ;-)

Listening to: Foo Fighters - Low