throws Exception

There was a big debate at work around Exception declaration in a Java API. I was quite surprised that such an apparently simple subject could end up being so controversial. The controversy was around the choice of declaring in the interfaces:

void myMethod() throws Exception

instead of

void myMethod() throws MyAPIException
void myMethod() throws MyAPIRuntimeException
void myMethod()

where MyAPI represents either a generic API related exception or a specific exception related to the method in question.

The choice of "throws Exception" did not even occur to me as a possibility, but after some digging, I found that some relatively famous libraries actually followed that principle at one point, for example Apache Struts 1.x or Spring MVC.

More modern libraries, like Google Guava, commons-math 3.x, Struts 2.x generally favor MyAPIRuntimeException where MyAPI is actually context-specific. Some old popular libraries declare a checked Exception, for example the HibernateException in Hibernate.

This seems to be a recurring subject on Stackoverflow:
Stackoverflow - Java interface throws Exception best practice
Stackoverflow - What to put in the throws clause of an interface method

But those are quite poor in terms of explanations. The best comments on this subjects are from:
Anders Hejlsberg (C#, Delphi, Turbo Pascal creator) - The Trouble with Checked Exceptions
James Gosling (Java creator) - Failure and Exceptions


This comment from Anders is particularly acute:
"To work around this requirement, people do ridiculous things. For example, they decorate every method with, "throws Exception." That just completely defeats the feature, and you just made the programmer write more gobbledy gunk. That doesn't help anybody. "



Today I believe the API in question declares "throws Exception"...