Serializing Objects

Serializing and deserializing

We’ve been working with bytes and file paths as foundations that support working with persistent objects. To make an object persistent, we need to create a series of bytes that represent the state of the object, and write those bytes to a file. The missing piece of persistence, then, is this process of encoding objects as a series of bytes. We also want to decode objects and their relationships from a series of bytes. This encoding and decoding is also described as serializing and deserializing.

When we look at web services, we’ll often see a service described as RESTful. REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer; the server and client will exchange representations of object states. The distinction here can be helpful: the two pieces of software don’t exchange objects. The ...