Serializable Interface

[vidya Sreedharan]

Hi,

Is it possible to persist an object to a database without implementing Serializable marker interface ?

Thanks,
Vidya

[Ulf Dittmer]

"Persist" can be understood to mean many different things. APIs like JPA work with annotations to indicate how objects should be persisted to a DB.

Persisting a serialized binary version of an object is a fraught business that should be avoided. Slightly better (if using something like JPA is not an option) would be to use the java.beans.XMLEncoder/XMLDecoder classes (assuming that the objects follow JavaBean semantics).

[Sagar Rohankar]

Ulf, are you suggesting that plain serialization of object is not good choice and you should look for other option like, XMLEncoder/Decoder ?

[Ulf Dittmer]

Yes. There are valid uses for binary serialization, but storing objects in a DB is not one of them.