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 021package org.apache.directory.api.asn1; 022 023 024/** 025 * <p> 026 * Provides the highest level of abstraction for Encoders. This is the sister 027 * interface of {@link 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 */ 035public interface Encoder 036{ 037 /** 038 * Encodes an "Object" and returns the encoded content as an Object. The 039 * Objects here may just be <code>byte[]</code> or <code>String</code>s 040 * depending on the implementation used. 041 * 042 * @param object An object to encode 043 * @return An "encoded" Object 044 * @throws EncoderException an encoder exception is thrown if the encoder experiences a 045 * failure condition during the encoding process. 046 */ 047 Object encode( Object object ) throws EncoderException; 048}