class Animal {
public
String name;
}
class Dog extends Animal implements Serializable {
// the rest of the Dog code
}
Because Animal is NOT serializable, any state maintained in the Animal class, even though the state variable is inherited by the Dog, isn't going to be restored with the Dog when it's deserialized! The reason is, the (unserialized) Animal part of the Dog is going to be reinitialized just as it would be if you were making a new Dog (as opposed to deserializing one). That means all the things that happen to an object during construction, will happen�but only to the Animal parts of a Dog. In other words, the instance variables from the Dog's class will be serialized and deserialized correctly, but the inherited variables from the non-serializable Animal superclass will come back with their default/initially assigned values rather than the values they had at the time of serialization.
If you are a serializable class, but your superclass is NOT serializable, then any instance variables you INHERIT from that superclass will be reset to the values they were given during the original construction of the object. This is because the non-serializable class constructor WILL run!
In fact, every constructor ABOVE the first non-serializable class constructor will also run, no matter what, because once the first super constructor is invoked, it of course invokes its super constructor and so on up the inheritance tree
