I would not even attempt to do this with ObjectStream - instead I would attempt to represent each data item in some compact text format, for example XML. There are plenty of tools for converting between XML and
Java objects.
Advantages:
1. You can
test with text files that can be edited, passed around easily, saved as test cases with documentation as XML comments.
2. On the client side you can use well understood SAX or STaX parsing of XML
3. Clients don't have to have the same version of Java -OR- even written in Java, ever so flexible.
You may find
my survey article on "pipeline" style processing of data to be helpful.
Here is the link for part 2 of that article. If you went with ObjectStream you would have to create a new connection for each object (or possibly collection of objects) and close it to finish the transmission correctly. With a text stream formatted as XML things are much more flexible.
Bill