/*
 * JBoss, Home of Professional Open Source
 * Copyright 2005, JBoss Inc., and individual contributors as indicated
 * by the @authors tag. 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.jboss.util.timeout;

/**
 * The public interface of timeouts.
 *   
 * @author <a href="osh@sparre.dk">Ole Husgaard</a>
 * @version $Revision$
*/
public interface Timeout
{
   /**
    * Cancel this timeout.
    *
    * It is guaranteed that on return from this method this timer is
    * no longer active. This means that either it has been cancelled and
    * the timeout will not happen, or (in case of late cancel) the
    * timeout has happened and the timeout callback function has returned.
    *
    * On return from this method this instance should no longer be
    * used. The reason for this is that an implementation may reuse
    * cancelled timeouts, and at return the instance may already be
    * in use for another timeout.
    */
   public boolean cancel();
}