Provides a superclass for all "collector" classes. A collector must provide only two abstract methods:
- getNextValues - to collect a set of data values
- releaseCollector - called to release any resources when the collector is stopped
The collector contains a poll interval, but does not initiate the poll events. These are called externally, by a caller that is expected to keep the convention of polling roughly every polling interval.
If the database handle is set, data will be written to the database as collected. If the database handle is "null" then data is collected but not stored in the database.
@author mark