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Another aspect of handling the state of a nonserializable superclass is that nonserializable superclasses must have a zero-argument constructor. This isn't important for serializing out an object, but it's incredibly important when deserializing an object. Deserialization works by creating an instance of a class and filling out its fields correctly. During this process, the deserialization algorithm doesn't actually call any of the serialized class's constructors, but does call the zero-argument constructor of the first nonserializable superclass. If there isn't a zero-argument constructor, then the deserialization algorithm can't create instances of the class, and the whole process fails.
WARNING: If you can't create a zero-argument constructor in the first nonserializable superclass, you'll have to implement the Externalizable interface instead.