Full description
Codec was formed as an attempt to focus development effort on one
definitive implementation of the Base64 encoder. At the time of Codec's
proposal, there were approximately 34 different Java classes that dealt
with Base64 encoding spread over the Foundation's CVS repository.
Developers in the Jakarta Tomcat project had implemented an original
version of the Base64 codec which had been copied by the Commons
HttpClient and Apache XML project's XML-RPC subproject. After almost one
year, the two forked versions of Base64 had significantly diverged from
one another. XML-RPC had applied numerous fixes and patches which were
not applied to the Commons HttpClient Base64. Different subprojects had
differing implementations at various levels of compliance with the RFC
2045.
Out of that confusing duplication of effort sprang this simple attempt
to encourage code reuse among various projects. While this package
contains a abstract framework for the creation of encoders and decoders,
Codec itself is primarily focused on providing functional utilities for
working with common encodings.