jade.lang.acl
Interface ACLCodec

All Known Implementing Classes:

StringACLCodec

public interface ACLCodec

Abstract interface for converting ACL messages back and forth between Java objects and raw byte sequences, according to a FIPA ACL message representation.

Version:

$Date: 2003/11/20 10:55:36 $ $Revision: 2.1 $

Author:

Giovanni Rimassa - Universita` di Parma

Nested Class Summary

static class

ACLCodec.CodecException This exception is thrown when some problem occurs in the concrete parsing subsystem accessed through this interface.

Method Summary

ACLMessage	decode(byte[] data) Recovers an ACLMessage object back from raw data, using the specific message representation to interpret the byte sequence.
byte[]	encode(ACLMessage msg) Encodes an ACLMessage object into a byte sequence, according to the specific message representation.
java.lang.String	getName() Query the name of the message representation handled by this Codec object.

Method Detail

encode

public byte[] encode(ACLMessage msg)

Encodes an ACLMessage object into a byte sequence, according to the specific message representation.

Parameters:

msg - The ACL message to encode.

Returns:

a byte array, containing the encoded message.

decode

public ACLMessage decode(byte[] data)
                  throws ACLCodec.CodecException

Recovers an ACLMessage object back from raw data, using the specific message representation to interpret the byte sequence.

Parameters:

data - The byte sequence containing the encoded message.

Returns:

A new ACLMessage object, built from the raw data.

Throws:

ACLCodec.CodecException - If some kind of syntax error occurs.

getName

public java.lang.String getName()

Query the name of the message representation handled by this Codec object. The FIPA standard representations have a name starting with "fipa.acl.rep.".

Returns:

The name of the handled ACL message representation.