Serialization and Deserialization

As per Wikipedia, serialization (or serialisation) is the process of translating data structures or object state into a format that can be stored (for example, in a file or memory buffer) or transmitted (for example, across a network connection link) and reconstructed later (possibly in a different computer environment).When the resulting series of bits is reread according to the serialization format, it can be used to create a semantically identical clone of the original object.

so basically Serialization is a process of converting an object into a sequence of bytes which can be persisted to a disk or database or can be sent through streams. The reverse process of creating object from sequence of bytes is called deserialization.

Serialization and Deserialization in java

To serialize and deserialize our object to a file we need to call ObjectOutputStream.writeObject() and ObjectInputStream.readObject() .

A class must implement Serializable interface present in java.io package in order to serialize its object successfully. Serializable is a marker interface that adds serializable behaviour to the class implementing it.

Java provides Serializable API encapsulated under java.io package for serializing and deserializing objects which include,

• java.io.serializable