What is "serialization"

Usages

Serialization provides some advantages such as:

• a simple and robust method of making persistent objects
• a method for implementing remote procedure calls
• an object distribution method, such as used in COM and CORBA.

For such functionalities to be enjoyed, the independence of architecture must be maintained. For example, a computer with a different hardware architecture should be able to consistently reconstruct the serial data stream.

Serialization also provides some disadvantages. Since coding is serial, to extract certain information from a data structure one must reconstruct the whole object before reading the information.

Support for programming languages

Various object-oriented programming languages support direct serialization:

Some of them are

• Objective-C
• Java
• Delphi
• C#
• Visual Basic . NET
• Coldfusion
• Ocaml
• Perl
• Python
• PHP

Ruby