Java Illuminated, 5th Edition

11.11 Reading and Writing Objects to a File

Throughout this text, we have emphasized the benefits of object-oriented programming. Just as we can write text and primitive data types to a file and subsequently read them from the file, we can also write objects to a file and subsequently read them as objects. This is convenient for two reasons:

• We can write these objects directly to a file without having to convert the objects to primitive data types or Strings.

• We can read the objects directly from a file, without having to read Strings and convert these Strings to primitive data types in order to instantiate objects.

To read objects from a file, the contents of the file must have been written as objects. So our first order of business should ...