posted 13 years ago
when you need a custom serialization, then you can go for Externalizable. however still you can do the custom serialization with serializable interface by defining readObject and writeObject.
The diference is that, Externalizable is not a marker interface .more over,In Serializable interface implementation, state of super classes are automatically taken care by the default implementation whereas in case of Externalizable interface the implementing class needs to handle everything on its own as there is no default implementation in this case.
*implements Externalizable* may tell a user that there is no default serialization implementation.