1 /*
2 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
3 * or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file
4 * distributed with this work for additional information
5 * regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file
6 * to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
7 * "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
8 * with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
9 *
10 * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
11 *
12 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
13 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
14 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
15 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
16 * limitations under the License.
17 */
18
19 package org.apache.river.discovery;
20
21 /**
22 * Interface implemented by all discovery format provider classes, which is
23 * used by the {@link Discovery} class to identify format providers available
24 * via resource, as described in the documentation for the
25 * {@link Discovery#getProtocol2(ClassLoader)} method. Format provider classes
26 * should not implement this interface directly, but should instead implement
27 * at least one of the format provider sub-interfaces extending this
28 * interface--{@link MulticastRequestEncoder}, {@link MulticastRequestDecoder},
29 * {@link MulticastAnnouncementEncoder}, {@link MulticastAnnouncementDecoder},
30 * {@link UnicastDiscoveryClient} and {@link UnicastDiscoveryServer}--which
31 * declare methods for the various provider operations, such as encoding or
32 * decoding discovery data.
33 *
34 * @author Sun Microsystems, Inc.
35 * @since 2.0
36 */
37 public interface DiscoveryFormatProvider {
38
39 /**
40 * Returns the name of the format implemented by this provider.
41 *
42 * @return the name of the format implemented by this provider
43 */
44 String getFormatName();
45 }