/*
 * Copyright 1999,2004 The Apache Software Foundation.
 * 
 * Licensed 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.catalina.tribes;

import java.io.Serializable;
/**
 * 
 * <p>Title: ChannelListener</p> 
 * 
 * <p>Description: An interface to listens to incoming messages from a channel </p> 
 * When a message is received, the Channel will invoke the channel listener in a conditional sequence.
 * <code>if ( listener.accept(msg,sender) ) listener.messageReceived(msg,sender);</code><br>
 * A ChannelListener implementation MUST NOT return true on <code>accept(Serializable, Member)</code>
 * if it doesn't intend to process the message. The channel can this way track whether a message
 * was processed by an above application or if it was just received and forgot about, a featuer required
 * to support message-response(RPC) calls<br>
 * 
 * @author Filip Hanik
 * @version 1.0
 */

public interface ChannelListener {

    /**
     * Receive a message from the channel
     * @param msg Serializable
     * @param sender - the source of the message
     */
    public void messageReceived(Serializable msg, Member sender);

    /**
     * Invoked by the channel to determine if the listener will process this message or not.
     * @param msg Serializable
     * @param sender Member
     * @return boolean
     */
    public boolean accept(Serializable msg, Member sender);

    /**
     * 
     * @param listener Object
     * @return boolean
     * @see Object#equals(Object)
     */
    public boolean equals(Object listener);

    /**
     * 
     * @return int
     * @see Object#hashCode(int)
     */
    public int hashCode();

}
