Can you explain what the throws keyword does in Java?

In Java, the keyword throws is used in a method declaration to indicate that this method may throw an exception of a certain type (or multiple types). It is part of the exception handling mechanism, allowing the calling code to be informed about possible errors that need to be handled or propagated further.

For example:

public void readFile(String filename) throws IOException {
    // code that may throw IOException
}

Here, the readFile method declares that it may throw an IOException. Calling this method requires handling this exception either through try-catch or by further declaring throws in the calling method.

Thus, throws helps explicitly specify checked exceptions that must be handled during compilation.