Java tutorial
/* * 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.binary; /** * 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; }