Can anybody explain me what is Serialization.
theausum 8 Junior Poster in Training
Traicey 10 Posting Whiz in Training
Its quite bit long... but worthy it
Serialization is the process of converting a set of object instances that contain references to each other into a linear stream of bytes, which can then be sent through a socket, stored to a file, or simply manipulated as a stream of data.
For an object to be serialized, it must be an instance of a class that implements either the Serializable or Externalizable interface. Both interfaces only permit the saving of data associated with an object's variables. They depend on the class definition being available to the Java Virtual Machine at reconstruction time in order to construct the object.
Adding object persistence to Java applications using serialization is easy. Serialization allows you to save the current state of an object to a container, typically a file. At some later time, you can retrieve the saved data values and create an equivalent object. Depending on which interface you implement, you can choose to have the object and all its referenced objects saved and restored automatically, or you can specify which fields should be saved and restored. Java also provides several ways of protecting sensitive data in a serialized object, so objects loaded from a serialized representation should prove no less secure than those classes loaded at application startup. Versioning provides a measure of the backward compatibility of class versions. The code needed to add serialization to your application is simple and flexible.
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