5.2 Goals

The goals are to:

• Support bidirectional communication between different versions of a class operating in different virtual machines by:

• Defining a mechanism that allows Java(tm) classes to read streams written by older versions of the same class.
• Defining a mechanism that allows Java(tm) classes to write streams intended to be read by older versions of the same class.

• Provide default serialization for persistence and for RMI.
• Perform well and produce compact streams in simple cases, so that RMI can use serialization.
• Be able to identify and load classes that match the exact class used to write the stream.
• Keep the overhead low for nonversioned classes.
• Use a stream format that allows the traversal of the stream without having to invoke methods specific to the objects saved in the stream.