Serialization

Serialization allows storing and persisting objects as bytes.

To activate serialization a class should be marked with the Serializable interface.

public class SerializableClass implements Serializable

Now the class can be sent through a serializable medium:

outputStream.writeObject(person);

Transient Fields

Transient fields are not serialized:

transient Blob bigField;

Versioning

To handle several versions of the same serializable class add the serialVersionUID field:

private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;