2. Byte streams

• Serialization is the process of writing the state of an object to a byte stream.

• Byte stream is simply a memory buffer provided to us by the system environment.

• Byte stream is very easy to store in a file and restore from the file afterwards.

• Restoring object state from a byte stream is called deserialization.

• Serialization can be complex when an object has references to other objects;

  • in such case writing and restoring state of all objects needs to be

    • properly ordered

    • arranged to restore both the objects and the references to them.