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.
Noncompliant code example
public void doSomething (String aString) throws NullPointerException {
throw new NullPointerException();
}
Compliant solution
public void doSomething (@NotNull String aString) {
}
