Serialization

[anita dhar]

hi,
i am not able to understand how serialzation works and where we are using this concept

[dhwani mathur]

hi anita,
I can clear your doubt to some extent,below shown is a link.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/javarmi/chapter/ch10.html

[Raghavan Muthu]

Serialization is preferred when you want to persist the state of the object.

That means saving the state of the object into a permanent storage. Say, into a file in the disk.

State of the Object means the values of instance variables of the object you are serializing excluding the variables which are declared as 'transient'.

Serialization - process of storing the state of object into a permanent stoage

Deserialization - reverse process; process of restoring the state of the object from the permanent storage

Important points to note:
------------------------
(a) Its mainly used when you do with RMI - Remote Method Invocation wherein you are supposed to pass the object into the network - over wires (streamlined version). Basically the objects should be of serializable in nature.
(b) The class whose instances gonna be serialized - should implement the interface java.io.Serializable.
(c) You can do the serialization and deserialization through the read() and write() methods.

Hope it clears now.

There are many more aspects with respect to serialization, which you can read it in tutorials, articles later. Just google it.
[ May 24, 2007: Message edited by: Raghavan Muthu ]

[Raghavan Muthu]

This link gives an explanation of Serialization with a good example.

It works good for Java SE 1.4.2. Try this.

Good luck.

[Stan James]

I'd modify Raghavan's explanation a bit to replace "permanent storage" with "any stream". The stream can go to or from anywhere ... disk, a String in memory, over the network, anything else you can imagine.

The term can refer to the general problem of sending data structures over a stream. We can use the same words - serialize and deserialize - for writing object state out to XML, JSON, CSV or some proprietary format and reading it back.

[Raghavan Muthu]

Thanks for the correction Stan James.

Yes, you are right