Java™ How To Program (Early Objects), Tenth Edition

11.5 Java Exception Hierarchy

All Java exception classes inherit directly or indirectly from class Exception, forming an inheritance hierarchy. You can extend this hierarchy with your own exception classes.

Figure 11.4 shows a small portion of the inheritance hierarchy for class Throwable (a subclass of Object), which is the superclass of class Exception. Only Throwable objects can be used with the exception-handling mechanism. Class Throwable has two direct sub-classes: Exception and Error. Class Exception and its subclasses—for instance, RuntimeException (package java.lang) and IOException (package java.io)—represent exceptional situations that can occur in a Java program and that can be caught by the application. Class Error and its subclasses ...