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1.10 The Serializable Interface

Object Serialization produces a stream with information about the JavaTM classes for the objects which are being saved. For serializable objects, sufficient information is kept to restore those objects even if a different (but compatible) version of the implementation of the class is present. The Serializable interface is defined to identify classes which implement the serializable protocol:

package java.io;

public interface Serializable {};
A Serializable class must do the following:

(Use the serialPersistentFields member to explicitly declare them serializable or use the transient keyword to denote nonserializable fields.)

The class can optionally define the following methods:

(See Section 2.5, "The writeReplace Method" for additional information.)

(See Section 3.6, "The readResolve Method" for additional information.)

ObjectOutputStream and ObjectInputStream allow the serializable classes on which they operate to evolve (allow changes to the classes that are compatible with the earlier versions of the classes). See Section 5.5, "Compatible Java(tm) Type Evolution" for information about the mechanism which is used to allow compatible changes.



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