Effective Java 3rd Ed: Question about Serialization chapter

[Durim Kryeziu]

Hi Josh,

Thank you very much for such a great book, I've read the 2nd edition of the book and I really learned a lot from it, so I plan to purchase the 3rd Edition soon.
My question is about the Serialization chapter, is it anything different from the 2nd edition's ? Because I don't see a lot of benefits learning the nitty gritty of Java's built-in serialization mechanism, correct me if I'm wrong! While I don't see that to be used a lot, almost everyone uses JSON now days.
So in the 3rd edition, what have you included in the Serialization chapter, still the Java's built-in mechanism ? or JSON/XML serialization and similar ?

Thanks in advance

[Rob Spoor]

The serialization items are still there, but if I recall correctly most of them claim to use serialization only if you have to. There are no specific items on any alternatives, but that's probably mostly because there is no out-of-the-box support for that in JSE. You need a third party library like Jackson or Gson, and I think the book rightfully doesn't make a choice for us.

[marten koomen]

The third edition suggests protobuf and JSON instead of serialization, as serialization has big security issues.

I'm interested in protobuf references for dummies if there are any, Josh's book has this link https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/  to a  google development site and that's pretty much it?

I'm an amateur developer, and am prototyping a multi server web app, where I have different VMs to communicate with each other, and I gather serialisation is not the done thing anymore in this context.

Any further resources on protobuf would be appreciated.

Cheers

Marten

[Joshua Bloch]

Marten Kay took the words right out of my mouth. The Serialization chapter now starts with an item warning you away from serialization, and suggesting JSON and protobuf as alternatives. It does not provide details on JSON and protobuf, as the book is too long as it stands. Because some of us still have to use Java serialization, I did bring the rest of the chapter up to date, but I hope far fewer people have to use this material than had to use the analogous items in the previous editions.

In (partial) answer to Marten's query, the Google tutorial on protobufs (https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/tutorials) is said to be pretty good. Here's the Java protobuf tutorial: https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/javatutorial.