A NullPointerException
should indicate that a null
value was unexpectedly encountered. Good programming practice dictates that code is structured to avoid NPE's.
Explicitly throwing NullPointerException
forces a method's callers to explicitly catch it, rather than coding to avoid it. Further, it makes it difficult to distinguish between the unexpectedly-encountered null
value and the condition which causes the method to purposely throw an NPE.
If an NPE is being thrown to indicate that a parameter to the method should not have been null, use the @NotNull
annotation instead.
public void doSomething (String aString) throws NullPointerException {}
public void doSomething (@NotNull String aString) {}