Homemade vs. Java Serialization

Question

I have a certain POJO which needs to be persisted on a database, current design specifies its field as a single string column, and adding additional fields to the table is not a

Answer 1

I'd say your initial approach is not all that bad if your POJO consists of Strings and primitive types. You could enforce escaping of the delimiter to prevent corruptions. Also if you use Hibernate you encapsulate the serialization in a custom type.

If you do not mind another dependency, Hessian is supposedly a more efficient way of serializing Java objects.