/*
 * Licensed to Elasticsearch under one or more contributor
 * license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with
 * this work for additional information regarding copyright
 * ownership. Elasticsearch 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.elasticsearch.common.io.stream;

import java.io.IOException;

/**
 * Implementers can be written to a {@linkplain StreamOutput} and read from a {@linkplain StreamInput}. This allows them to be "thrown
 * across the wire" using Elasticsearch's internal protocol. If the implementer also implements equals and hashCode then a copy made by
 * serializing and deserializing must be equal and have the same hashCode. It isn't required that such a copy be entirely unchanged.
 *
 * Prefer implementing {@link Writeable} over implementing this interface where possible. Lots of code depends on this interface so this
 * isn't always possible.
 *
 * Implementers of this interface almost always declare a no arg constructor that is exclusively used for creating "empty" objects on which
 * you then call {@link #readFrom(StreamInput)}. Because {@linkplain #readFrom(StreamInput)} isn't part of the constructor the fields
 * on implementers cannot be final. It is these reasons that this interface has fallen out of favor compared to {@linkplain Writeable}.
 */
public interface Streamable {
    /**
     * Set this object's fields from a {@linkplain StreamInput}.
     */
    void readFrom(StreamInput in) throws IOException;

    /**
     * Write this object's fields to a {@linkplain StreamOutput}.
     */
    void writeTo(StreamOutput out) throws IOException;
}