Re: Beginner java question: Serializable

[Sergio Carabetta <Sergio.Carabetta@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

For God's sake, DON'T!!!

There are a few and specific cases where you can profit from Java's built-in
serialization mechanism. For sending an object thru a socket connection, or
writing to disk a parametrized "visual" bean (for use in a visual builder
IDE, for example), but DO NOT make all your data classes Serializable by
default.

You don't want to fill your file system with "Customer" serialized objects,
right? Use JDBC and/or EJBs for persisting business data. Use serialize to
convert a particular object to a byte stream representation and send/receive
upon a network connection, or saving to/retrieving from disk.

But I would recommend using an XML format representation instead of the
Java-propietary Serializable format. Could be a more flexible approach.

Hope this helps

Sergio

>> message: 5
>> date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 10:03:34 -0600
>> from: <SRamanujan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> subject: RE: Beginner java question: Serializable
>> 
>> >From what I understand, serializablity of a class is the ability to
>> convert an object to byte array and back to an object.  This 
>> is used to
>> write/read back from an external persistent file/database.  So by
>> default, all the data classes will be defined as 
>> serializable so that we
>> could use their methods to perform these actions.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Sudha
>> 
>> Sudha Ramanujan
>> SunGard Futures Systems
>> sramanujan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> (312) 577 6179
>> (312) 577 6101 - Fax