Native Mobile Development

Chapter 12. Serialization and Transports

To serialize an object we convert the abstract concept (the “model”) to transportable entities, usually either a String representation of the model, like XML or JSON, or bytes.

To deserialize data means to convert it from a series of entities to an object your program recognizes. For example, you might have an Author entity with a name property.

Tasks

In this chapter, you’ll learn to:

1. Serialize and deserialize an object instance.

Android

Android uses a lot of XML internally, but in the real world, JSON is still the primary serialization mechanism (although larger organizations with plenty of engineering resources have started to embrace “protobuf,” or Protocol Buffers). This is a neat concept and highly performant, but beyond the scope of our examination of the framework and standard APIs.

Serialize and Deserialize an Object Instance

In Java and Android, deserialization probably starts with a data model, like this:

Java

public class Author {
  private String mName;
  public String getName() {
    return mName;
  }
  public void setName(String name) {
    mName = name;
  }
}

Kotlin

class Author {
  var name:String? = null
}

Deserialized to JSON, an Author instance that returned “Mike” by invoking getName would probably look like this:

{ name : "Mike" }

Once it’s in JSON format, it can be passed along with a network request, written to disk, or even handed off to another program in wildly different technologies; since the JSON format has an established ...