content: /*
   * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
   * contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
   * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
   * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
   * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
   * the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
   *
   *      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
   *
   * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
   * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
   * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
   * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
   * limitations under the License.
   */
  
  package com.zzzmode.apkeditor.utils;
  
  /**
   * Provides the highest level of abstraction for Decoders.
   * <p>
   * This is the sister interface of {@link Encoder}. All Decoders implement this common generic interface.
   * Allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Decoder implementation in the codec package.
   * <p>
   * One of the two interfaces at the center of the codec package.
   *
   * @version $Id$
   */
  public interface Decoder {
  
      /**
       * Decodes an "encoded" Object and returns a "decoded" Object. Note that the implementation of this interface will
       * try to cast the Object parameter to the specific type expected by a particular Decoder implementation. If a
       * {@link ClassCastException} occurs this decode method will throw a DecoderException.
       *
       * @param source
       *            the object to decode
       * @return a 'decoded" object
       * @throws DecoderException
       *             a decoder exception can be thrown for any number of reasons. Some good candidates are that the
       *             parameter passed to this method is null, a param cannot be cast to the appropriate type for a
       *             specific encoder.
       */
      Object decode(Object source) throws DecoderException;
  }
  