001/**
002 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
003 * contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
004 * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
005 * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
006 * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
007 * the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
008 *
009 *      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
010 *
011 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
012 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
013 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
014 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
015 * limitations under the License.
016 */
017package org.apache.kahadb.util;
018
019import java.io.DataInput;
020import java.io.DataOutput;
021import java.io.IOException;
022
023/**
024 * 
025 */
026public interface Marshaller<T> {
027    
028    /**
029     * Write the payload of the object to the DataOutput stream.
030     * 
031     * @param object 
032     * @param dataOut
033     * @throws IOException
034     */
035    void writePayload(T object, DataOutput dataOut) throws IOException;
036    
037    
038    /**
039     * Read the payload of the object from the DataInput stream.
040     * 
041     * @param dataIn 
042     * @return unmarshalled object
043     * @throws IOException
044     */
045    T readPayload(DataInput dataIn) throws IOException;
046
047    /** 
048     * @return -1 if the object do not always marshall to a fixed size, otherwise return that fixed size.
049     */
050    int getFixedSize();
051    
052    /**
053     * 
054     * @return true if the {@link #deepCopy(Object)} operations is supported.
055     */
056    boolean isDeepCopySupported();
057
058    /**
059     * @return a deep copy of the source object.
060     */
061    T deepCopy(T source);
062   
063}