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/*
 * 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.configuration2.beanutils;

/**
 * 
 * Definition of an interface for bean factories.
 * 
 * 
 * Beans defined in configuration files are not directly created, but by so called bean factories. This
 * additional level of indirection provides for high flexibility in the creation process. For instance one
 * implementation of this interface could be very simple and create a new instance of the specified class for each
 * invocation. A different implementation could cache already created beans and ensure that always the same bean of the
 * given class will be returned - this would be an easy mean for creating singleton objects.
 * 
 * 
 * The interface itself is quite simple. There is a single method for creating a bean of a given class. All necessary
 * parameters are obtained from a passed in {@link BeanCreationContext} object. It is also possible (but optional) for a
 * bean factory to declare the default class of the bean it creates. Then it is not necessary to specify a bean class in
 * the bean declaration.
 * 
 *
 * @since 1.3
 */
public interface BeanFactory {

    /**
     * Creates a bean instance for the given context object. All information about the bean to be created are contained in
     * the provided {@code BeanCreationContext} object. This includes a {@link BeanDeclaration} defining the properties of
     * the bean. It is up to a concrete implementation how the bean is created and initialized.
     *
     * @param bcc the context object for the bean to be created
     * @return the new bean instance (should not be null)
     * @throws Exception if an error occurs (the helper classes for creating beans will catch this generic exception and
     *         wrap it in a configuration exception)
     */
    Object createBean(BeanCreationContext bcc) throws Exception;

    /**
     * Gets the default bean class of this bean factory. If an implementation here returns a non null value, bean
     * declarations using this factory do not need to provide the name of the bean class. In such a case an instance of the
     * default class will be created.
     *
     * @return the default class of this factory or null if there is none
     */
    Class getDefaultBeanClass();
}