/*
 * JBoss, Home of Professional Open Source
 * Copyright 2011 Red Hat Inc. and/or its affiliates and other
 * contributors as indicated by the @author tags. All rights reserved.
 * See the copyright.txt in the distribution for a full listing of
 * individual contributors.
 *
 * This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
 * under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as
 * published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of
 * the License, or (at your option) any later version.
 *
 * This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
 * Lesser General Public License for more details.
 *
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public
 * License along with this software; if not, write to the Free
 * Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA
 * 02110-1301 USA, or see the FSF site: http://www.fsf.org.
 */

package org.infinispan.marshall;

import java.lang.annotation.Documented;
import java.lang.annotation.ElementType;
import java.lang.annotation.Inherited;
import java.lang.annotation.Retention;
import java.lang.annotation.RetentionPolicy;
import java.lang.annotation.Target;

/**
 * Indicate that this class should be serialized with an instance of the given
 * {@link Externalizer} class.
 *
 * Any externalizer type referred by this annotation must be either
 * {@link java.io.Serializable} or {@link java.io.Externalizable} because the
 * marshalling infrastructure will ship an instance of the externalizer to any
 * node that's no aware of this externalizer, hence allowing for dynamic
 * externalizer discovery.
 *
 * @author Galder Zamarreño
 * @since 5.0
 */
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Target(ElementType.TYPE)
@Inherited
@Documented
public @interface SerializeWith {

   /**
    * Specify the externalizer class to be used by the annotated class.
    *
    * @return the externalizer type
    */
   Class<? extends Externalizer<?>> value();

}
