/*
 * 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.commons.codec;

/**
 * <p>Provides the highest level of abstraction for Encoders.
 * This is the sister interface of {@link Decoder}.  Every implementation of
 * Encoder provides this common generic interface whic allows a user to pass a 
 * generic Object to any Encoder implementation in the codec package.</p>
 *
 * @author Apache Software Foundation
 * @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 ot 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;
}