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Panda Core is the core module of Panda Framework, it contains commonly used utility classes similar to apache-commons.

There is a newer version: 1.8.0

package panda.codec;

/**
 * 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 which allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Encoder
 * implementation in the codec package.
 */
public interface Encoder {

	/**
	 * Encodes an "Object" and returns the encoded content as an Object. The Objects here may just
	 * be byte[] or Strings 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;
}