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Which API were you using? Java's HttpUrlConnection is notoriously badly designed [0] On Android (and elsewhere of course) you can use Apache's HttpClient instead which is a bit less horrible [1]. Part of this problem is checked vs unchecked exceptions, and some of the older APIs in Java use checked exceptions too heavily, IMHO. On top of that, I think all the Java IO stuff provides a pretty leaky abstraction over the system calls.

I had a somewhat long discussion with a colleague about this over the past year, and we looked at all the error cases in the C standard library and came to the conclusion the Java API was probably throwing checked exceptions in one or two corner cases where it should throw unchecked runtime exceptions. I'd be curious what other people think about this. I think specifically, I was asking him (a more Sr. engineer who has used Java heavily and considers it basically good) why closing an IO stream in a finally block throws another checked exception.

In short, I don't think you're doing anything wrong.

[0] See this, but I should caveat this with saying it's a bad API as designed to be consumed by an application. http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/01/17/HttpURLCon...

[1] http://developer.android.com/reference/org/apache/http/clien...

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public String setCache(String key, String value) throws CacheUnavailableException,CacheWriteException { try { ... } catch (SocketException e) { throw new CacheUnavailableException(e); } catch (SomeMemcacheException e) { throw new CacheWriteException(e); } }