The filter API consists of a small set of Java interfaces. Each interface is designed to serve a specific purpose such as processing an HTTP request, HTTP reply, or the entire contents of an HTML document. The interfaces a filter implements are inspected at runtime by the Handler component to determine which parts of the HTTP transaction should be processed by which filters.
The following is a list of filter interfaces supported by the Muffin filtering system:
These interfaces are provided to make the filtering system both flexible and extendable. The components of the filtering system are built to operate with filters that implement one or more of the provided interfaces. New filters can be integrated into the filtering system by simply implementing the necessary filter interfaces.
The purpose of each of the filter interfaces will be covered in the following sections. An example will also be include to show how the interfaces can be used to write a filter ready to be used by the filtering system.