001 /*
002 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
003 * or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file
004 * distributed with this work for additional information
005 * regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file
006 * to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
007 * "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
008 * with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
009 *
010 * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
011 *
012 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
013 * software distributed under the License is distributed on an
014 * "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
015 * KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the
016 * specific language governing permissions and limitations
017 * under the License.
018 *
019 */
020
021 package org.apache.directory.shared.asn1.codec;
022
023
024 /**
025 * <p>
026 * Provides the highest level of abstraction for Encoders. This is the sister
027 * interface of {@link org.apache.directory.shared.asn1.codec.Decoder}. Every
028 * implementation of Encoder provides this common generic interface whic allows
029 * a user to pass a generic Object to any Encoder implementation in the codec
030 * package.
031 * </p>
032 *
033 * @author <a href="mailto:dev@directory.apache.org">Apache Directory Project</a>
034 * @version $Id: Encoder.java 437004 2006-08-25 22:53:17Z elecharny $
035 */
036 public interface Encoder
037 {
038
039 /**
040 * Encodes an "Object" and returns the encoded content as an Object. The
041 * Objects here may just be <code>byte[]</code> or <code>String</code>s
042 * depending on the implementation used.
043 *
044 * @param pObject
045 * An object ot encode
046 * @return An "encoded" Object
047 * @throws EncoderException
048 * an encoder exception is thrown if the encoder experiences a
049 * failure condition during the encoding process.
050 */
051 Object encode( Object pObject ) throws EncoderException;
052 }