What Is Object Serialization?

To this point, you've been working with objects and ways to manipulate those objects through the methods defined on them. You have created an application, started it, and instantiated some objects. When that application exited, those objects—or really the state of those objects—was lost. To keep that from happening, you need to learn how to save that state for later retrieval.

The term for saving the state of an object to an external source so that it can be constructed later is usually known as persistence. In other words, you will want to ensure that the object persists over a longer life cycle than just the execution of an application. Later when you learn about JDBC and Databases, you'll also get more detail ...

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