/**
* 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.
*/
/**
* <p>
* This package provides the definition and implementation of HBase's
* extensible data type API. {@link org.apache.hadoop.hbase.types.DataType}
* is the entry point. Basic type implementations are provided based on two
* different encoding schemes: the {@code Raw*} implementations use the
* {@code toXXX} methods in {@link org.apache.hadoop.hbase.util.Bytes} and
* the {@code Ordered*} implementations use the encoding scheme defined in
* {@link org.apache.hadoop.hbase.util.OrderedBytes}. Complex types are also
* supported in the form of {@link org.apache.hadoop.hbase.types.Struct} and
* the abstract {@code Union} classes.
* </p>
* <p>
* {@link org.apache.hadoop.hbase.types.DataType} implementations are used to
* convert a POJO into a {@code byte[]} while maintaining application-level
* constraints over the values produces and consumed. They also provide hints
* to consumers about the nature of encoded values as well as the relationship
* between different instances. See the class comments on
* {@link org.apache.hadoop.hbase.types.DataType} for details.
* </p>
* <p>
* The {@link org.apache.hadoop.hbase.types.DataType} interface is primarily
* of use for creating rowkeys and column qualifiers. It can also be used as a
* an encoder for primitive values. It does not support concerns of complex
* object serialization, concepts like schema version and migration. These
* concepts are handled more thoroughly by tools like Thrift, Avro, and
* Protobuf.
* </p>
*
* @since 0.95.2
*/
package org.apache.hadoop.hbase.types;