Ajith wrote:
"But there will be an overhead involved because the runtime has to call your methods to read/write objects."
Serialization has huge overheads in having to paw through private stuff via the JVM that is normally unavailable, and also with all the reflection it uses. Externalization is a simple method call.
There is no overhead to the calls to your methods, it normally works out faster. Perverse, but true.
--Jack
http://www.JavaPerformanceTuning.com/