Another thoughts: The class variables are not important to be serialized because they are shared between all of your instances of the class. Should they be serialized, deserialized each time an object is? Obviously not. It seems to me that the state that makes different an instance of the other are the instance fields. Because static variables are identical for all of them. Also, wherever you deserialized the object you will need the class there to use it. And there (in the class) the static variables go.
