Serialization

Serialization is the process of converting structured objects into a byte stream that will be transferred over a network or will be written to a persistent storage. Deserialization is the process of converting a byte stream back into structured objects. The basic question that some of us always have is, why do we need serialization? Let us understand it in simple terms. Every language or application has its own way of representing data, for example, Java has objects to represent data, Spark has RDD to represent data, MapReduce has writable objects to represent data, and so on. These representations are only known to frameworks that can be processed in memory, but this data cannot be shared between different processes or applications that have a different way of representing data. Now, we are clear that data needs some common representation when it is written to the storage system or shared across networks to be used by different applications. In most cases, writing data into...