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 Encoders.
   * <p>
   * This is the sister interface of {@link Decoder}.  Every implementation of Encoder provides this
   * common generic interface which allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Encoder implementation
   * in the codec package.
   *
   * @version $Id$
   */
  public interface Encoder {
  
      /**
       * Encodes an "Object" and returns the encoded content as an Object. The Objects here may just be
       * <code>byte[]</code> or <code>String</code>s depending on the implementation used.
       *
       * @param source
       *            An object to encode
       * @return An "encoded" Object
       * @throws EncoderException
       *             An encoder exception is thrown if the encoder experiences a failure condition during the encoding
       *             process.
       */
      Object encode(Object source) throws EncoderException;
  }
  