Microsoft® Visual J#™ .NET (Core Reference)

Chapter 10. Serializing Objects

The previous chapter highlighted the problems associated with transporting data of varying lengths and formats over a network. The main issue is using a structure to represent the data that a sender and a receiver both agree on and that is unambiguous—to avoid little endian vs. big endian questions, for example. The same problems can arise when you persist objects to a data store: Applications that write data must use a format that other applications can interpret correctly. (The term data store in this context can mean a database, a collection of files, or some other set of data.)

Often, you’ll need to convert an object from the internal format used in an application to a format suitable for persistence or transportation. ...