serialization and sizeof (again :-)

[Tian Zhang]

hi there!

i would like to send objects over sockets, but would like to be able to determine the size of the serialized object so i can provide an estimate of how long it would take to send. i understand that there is no "straight forward" way of determining the size of an object, but is there a way of finding how big the serialized object without having to write it to file, and then looking at how big the file is? - this would complicate matters as the objects may contain sensative data.

thanks,
tian

[Tony Morris]

You would have to buffer it in memory as a sequence of bytes and use that as your metric of size.

[William Brogden]

See java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream - note that the resulting byte[] will also be handy for encrypting your sensitive object.
Bill

[Tian Zhang]

thanks!

i half suspected as much