1 /* 2 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one 3 * or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file 4 * distributed with this work for additional information 5 * regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file 6 * to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the 7 * "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance 8 * with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at 9 * 10 * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 11 * 12 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, 13 * software distributed under the License is distributed on an 14 * "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY 15 * KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the 16 * specific language governing permissions and limitations 17 * under the License. 18 * 19 */ 20 21 package org.apache.directory.api.asn1; 22 23 24 /** 25 * <p> 26 * Provides the highest level of abstraction for Encoders. This is the sister 27 * interface of {@link Decoder}. Every 28 * implementation of Encoder provides this common generic interface whic allows 29 * a user to pass a generic Object to any Encoder implementation in the codec 30 * package. 31 * </p> 32 * 33 * @author <a href="mailto:dev@directory.apache.org">Apache Directory Project</a> 34 */ 35 public interface Encoder 36 { 37 /** 38 * Encodes an "Object" and returns the encoded content as an Object. The 39 * Objects here may just be <code>byte[]</code> or <code>String</code>s 40 * depending on the implementation used. 41 * 42 * @param object An object to encode 43 * @return An "encoded" Object 44 * @throws EncoderException an encoder exception is thrown if the encoder experiences a 45 * failure condition during the encoding process. 46 */ 47 Object encode( Object object ) throws EncoderException; 48 }