What is object serialization?

Question

What is meant by \"object serialization\"? Can you please explain it with some examples?

Answer 1

I'll offer an analogy to potentially assist in solidifying the conceptual purpose/practicality of object serialization/deserialization.

I imagine object serialization/deserialization in the context of attempting to move an object through a storm drain. The object is essentially "decomposed" or serialized into more modular versions of itself - in this case, a series of bytes - in order to effectively be granted passage through a medium. In a computational sense, we could view the path traveled by the bytes through the storm drain as being akin to bytes traveling through a network. We're transmuting our object in order to conform to a more desirable mode of transportation, or format. The serialized object will typically be stored in a binary file which may later be read from, written to, or both.

Perhaps once our object is able to slip through the drain as a decomposed series of bytes, we may wish to store that representation of the object as binary data within a database or hard disk drive. The main takeaway though, is that with serialization/deserialization, we have the option to let our object remain in it's binary form after being serialized, or "retrieve" the object's original form by performing deserialization.