Serialization and Deserialization in Java
Serialization in Java is a mechanism of writing the state of an object into a byte-stream. It is mainly used in Hibernate, RMI, JPA, EJB and JMS technologies.
The reverse operation of serialization is called deserialization where byte-stream is converted into an object. The serialization and deserialization process is platform-independent, it means you can serialize an object on one platform and deserialize it on a different platform.
For serializing the object, we call the writeObject() method of ObjectOutputStream class, and for deserialization we call the readObject() method of ObjectInputStream class.
Advantages of Java Serialization
It is mainly used to travel object's state on the network (that is known as marshalling)
Serializable is a marker interface (has no data member and method). It is used to "mark" Java classes so that the objects of these classes may get a certain capability. The Cloneable and Remote are also marker interfaces.
The Serializable interface must be implemented by the class whose object needs to be persisted.
The String class and all the wrapper classes implement the java.io.Serializable interface by default.
Let's see the example given below:
Student.java
import java.io.Serializable;
public class Student implements Serializable{
int id;
String name;
public Student(int id, String name) {
this.id = id;
this.name = name;
}
}
In the above example, Student class implements Serializable interface. Now its objects can be converted into stream.
