/*
 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
 * contributor license agreements.  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.  For additional information regarding
 * copyright in this work, please see the NOTICE file in the top level
 * directory of this distribution.
 */
package org.apache.abdera2.protocol;

import java.util.Date;

import org.apache.abdera2.common.http.EntityTag;
import org.apache.abdera2.writer.StreamWriter;

/**
 * An EntityProvider is used to serialize entities using the StreamWriter interface. The EntityProvider interface can be
 * implemented by applications to provide an efficient means of serializing non-FOM objects to Atom/XML.
 */
public interface EntityProvider {

    /**
     * Write to the specified StreamWriter
     */
    void writeTo(StreamWriter sw);

    /**
     * True if the serialization is repeatable.
     */
    boolean isRepeatable();

    /**
     * Return the mime content type of the serialized entity
     */
    String getContentType();

    /**
     * Return the EntityTag of the entity,
     */
    EntityTag getEntityTag();

    /**
     * Return the Last-Modified date of the entity
     */
    Date getLastModified();

}