Originally posted by vijay shanker:
What does serialization mean?
Serialization is a process in which you can "serialize" or "persist" the state of an object in a permanent storage.
What are these terms mean? persist means saving.
permanent means into a file in a disk for example.
state of an object means the data values an instance holds to get its uniqueness.
Why do you need such an action? When you say "a state of an object", the scope of the state is existing only temporarily. that means till the time your program is in memory (memory which helps you create an object].
What if you need to hold the data values held by an object even after the program terminates?
You need to shift the data values from this memory (RAM) to another place, that could range anything which helps to get the values without the actual program which was responsible of dealing with this particular instance.
That target location should offer you the "permanent" storage. That's why this
persistence came in picture and you have "serialization" to achieve this.
To read more about Serialization, you may please read the Sun's tutorials
here.
Does that help?