I suspect it's actually a pretty good analogy, if you've ever had to hire a lawyer. But I can see where it may not be clear to everyone. Alternately:
Java provides a pretty good implementation of serialization, by default. Basically it just goes through all the fields of a class (and its superclasses) and writes them to a stream. OK, cool, this is all you need for many classes. It's a pretty good default. However, it's not always appropriate. And example is the Connection class. You can write the parameters of a connection to a file somewhere, fine. However if you deserialize it - you read the host name and use name and password and whatver else is necessary, and create a Connection using those parameters - have you really recreated the original Connection? Well, no, at least not as far as the DB is concerned. You've merely created a new Connection with the same parameters as the original. If, for example, you close() the original Connection, this would have no effect on the new one. So serialization isn't really appropitate here, at leat not in the sense of reconstituting the
original object. We don't want people to think they've rebuilt the original object here - that would be too confusting. There are other classes it may not be appropriate to serialize. Java chose to make the default serialization process an opt-in mechanism - that is, Java will only serialize a class if the class declaration specifies that the default serialization mechanism is appropriate. (Or they can specify an alternate mechanism via Externalizable, but that's another post.) The way to opt in is simple - just specify that the class implements Serializable. That's it. The JVM can
test this easily enough - the default implementation of writeObject() can be thought of as:
In other words, the only role of a marker interface like Serializable is as a sort of binary flag. Either the JVM should use the default serialization process, or it shouldn't. It's up to the class author to decide whether (obj instanceof Serializable) should return true - if so, you'd better implement Serializable.