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 org.apache.activemq.store.kahadb.disk.util;
  
  import java.io.DataInput;
  import java.io.DataOutput;
  import java.io.IOException;
  
  /**
   * 
   */
  public interface Marshaller<T> {
      
      /**
       * Write the payload of the object to the DataOutput stream.
       * 
       * @param object 
       * @param dataOut
       * @throws IOException
       */
      void writePayload(T object, DataOutput dataOut) throws IOException;
      
      
      /**
       * Read the payload of the object from the DataInput stream.
       * 
       * @param dataIn 
       * @return unmarshalled object
       * @throws IOException
       */
      T readPayload(DataInput dataIn) throws IOException;
  
      /** 
       * @return -1 if the object do not always marshall to a fixed size, otherwise return that fixed size.
       */
      int getFixedSize();
      
      /**
       * 
       * @return true if the {@link #deepCopy(Object)} operations is supported.
       */
      boolean isDeepCopySupported();
  
      /**
       * @return a deep copy of the source object.
       */
      T deepCopy(T source);
     
  }
  