/*
* 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.beanutils;
/**
* <p>General purpose data type converter that can be registered and used
* within the BeanUtils package to manage the conversion of objects from
* one type to another.</p>
*
* <p>Converter subclasses bundled with the BeanUtils library are required
* to be thread-safe, as users of the library may call conversion methods
* from more than one thread simultaneously.</p>
*
* <p>Custom converter subclasses created by users of the library can be
* non-thread-safe if the application using them is single-threaded. However
* it is recommended that they be written in a thread-safe manner anyway.</p>
*
* @author Craig McClanahan
* @author Paulo Gaspar
* @version $Revision: 555824 $ $Date: 2007-07-13 01:27:15 +0100 (Fri, 13 Jul 2007) $
* @since 1.3
*/
public interface Converter {
/**
* Convert the specified input object into an output object of the
* specified type.
*
* @param type Data type to which this value should be converted
* @param value The input value to be converted
* @return The converted value
*
* @exception ConversionException if conversion cannot be performed
* successfully
*/
public Object convert(Class type, Object value);
}