Welcome to JavaRanch! Yes, your question is quite appropriate for this forum.
I haven't actually hit a NotActiveException before, but I think the cause is that you explicitly call writeObject() and defaultWriteObject() from your code. Usually when you want a class to be Serializable, you just implement the Serializable interface and let the
Java VM worry about the details. Serializable is a marker interface, which means it has no methods to implement. It just "marks" a class, telling the JVM that the class designer says that it's OK for this class to be converted to a serialized form.
Now the writeObject(), readObject() methods exists for the user to take some control over the serialization process. The only time I've ever used one was when I used the readObject() method to fix up objects serialized from a previous version of the class when I deserialized them. So, for example, if I had added a field to the class, I could use readObject() to set a value to that field when I deserialized an object that didn't have a value for it.
Externalizable extends Serializable, and lets the class author take complete control over the external representation of the serialized object. It forces you to implement the readExternal() and writeExternal() methods to accomplish this. If I understand it correctly, the JVM will still build the object tree when you decide to serialize something, but you decide how that tree will be translated to a serial form. I can see that being useful if you wanted to encrypt fields on serialization and decrypt them on deserialization.
Anyway, that got a bit long, but the basic idea is there's no reason to directly call the readObject() and writeObject() methods. If you include them in your class, you can just let the JVM decide when they're called. Most of the time you don't need to include them at all.
I hope you'll stick around the Ranch for awhile now that you've found us. Maybe even answer a few questions yourself!