In computer science, in the context of data storage and transmission, serialization is the process of converting an object into a sequence of bits so that it can be persisted on a storage medium (such as a file, or a memory buffer) or transmitted across a network connection link. When the resulting series of bits is reread according to the serialization format, it can be used to create a semantically identical clone of the original object. For ma...
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In computer science, in the context of data storage and transmission, serialization is the process of converting an object into a sequence of bits so that it can be persisted on a storage medium (such as a file, or a memory buffer) or transmitted across a network connection link. When the resulting series of bits is reread according to the serialization format, it can be used to create a semantically identical clone of the original object. For many complex objects, such as those that make extensive use of references, this process is not straightforward.
This process of serializing an object is also called deflating or marshalling an object. The opposite operation, extracting a data structure from a series of bytes, is deserialization (which is also called inflating or unmarshalling).
Serialization has a number of advantages. It provides:
For some of these features to be useful, architecture independence must be maintained. For example, for maximal use of distribution, a computer...
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