The manual, or manuals, that David refers to might include
the Object Serialization secion of Sun's
Java Tutorial, and
the documentation for the interface Serializable.
From these, you might notice that objects are sometimes serialized in order to save them (or their state) to a file, or to transmit them from one JVM to another (perhaps over the internet).
[ May 09, 2004: Message edited by: Dirk Schreckmann ]
