Java Programming for Beginners

The Serializable class

Often, when we're dealing with information outside of our actual code, we're dealing with human-readable text that we've gotten from a file or are writing to a file or from an input or output stream. However, sometimes, human-readable text is just not convenient, and we'd like to use information that's more computer friendly. Through a process called serialization, we can take some Java objects and convert them into a binary stream that we could transfer across programs. This is not a human-friendly approach, as we'll see in this section. A serialized object looks like complete gibberish to us, but another Java program that knows about that object's class can recreate an object from that serialized information.

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