Interview Questions - Java Basics

Serialization is a mechanism by which you can save the state of an object by converting it to a byte stream.

The class whose instances are to be serialized should implement an interface Serializable. Then you pass the instance to the ObjectOutputStream which is connected to a fileoutputstream. This will save the object to a file.

The serializable interface is an empty interface, it does not contain any methods. So we do not implement any methods.

Yes it is possible to have control over serialization process. The class should implement Externalizable interface. This interface contains two methods namely readExternal and writeExternal.

You should implement these methods and write the logic for customizing the serialization process.