131. Serializing objects to byte arrays

In Chapter 4, Problem 94, we talked about the serialization/deserialization of Java records, so you should be pretty familiar with these operations. In a nutshell, serialization is the process of transforming an in-memory object into a stream of bytes that can also be stored in memory or written to a file, network, database, external storage, and so on. Deserialization is the reverse process, that is, recreating the object state in memory from the given stream of bytes.

A Java object is serializable if its class implements java.io.Serializable (or, java.io.Externalizable). Accomplishing serialization/deserialization takes place via the java.io.ObjectOutputStream and java.io.ObjectInputStream classes and writeObject()/readObject() methods.

For instance, let’s assume the following Melon class:

public class Melon implements Serializable {
  private final String type;
  private final float weight;
  // constructor, getters
}

...