What is the serialization?

In computer science, in the context of data storage, serialization is the process of translating data structures or object state into a format that can be stored or transmitted and reconstructed later.

The Serializable interface is just a “marker” interface, with no methods of its own to implement.

The byte stream created is platform independent. So, the object serialized on one platform can be deserialized on a different platform.

To make a Java object serializable we need to implement the java.io.Serializable interface.

The ObjectOutputStream class contains writeObject() method for serializing an Object.

public final void writeObject(Object obj) throws IOException

The ObjectInputStream class contains readObject() method for deserializing an object.

public final Object readObject() throws IOException, ClassNotFoundException

Other ‘marker’ interfaces are

java.rmi.Remote
java.util.EventListener