Can anybody clear me.  When to implement Serializable and when to implement Externalizable?
And how they work serializing a object.

Umapada Manna

Basically SERIALIZABLE uses default implementation for reading and writing the object you want to persist.
You just have to implement SERIALIZABLE interface for your class and rest will be taken care.

For EXTERNALIZABLE you will have to implement the readExternal() and writeExternal() methods.
As in you can specify your own way of storing the information and retrieving the information of the object.

Unless you have very specific requirements one wouldn't use EXTERNALIZABLE.

SERIALIZABLE is the most common form of using.

All you would specify is to implement the SERIALIZABLE interface in the class declaration and nothing more.

Pallav

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