/*
 * JBoss, Home of Professional Open Source
 * Copyright 2010, Red Hat 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.as.naming;

/**
 * A reference to a container managed object
 *
 * @author Stuart Douglas
 */
public interface ManagedReference {
    /**
     * Release the reference. Depending on the implementation this may destroy
     * the underlying object.
     * <p/>
     * Implementers should take care to make this method idempotent,
     * as it may be called multiple times.
     */
    void release();

    /**
     * Get the object instance.
     *
     * @return the object this reference refers to
     */
    Object getInstance();
}
