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Object Streams and Serialization
Serializing Families of Classes
Serialization and Class Versioning
Custom Serialization and Security
Serialized Applets
Advanced Serialization

One disadvantage of storing objects in memory, during program execution, is that those objects only exist until the program terminates, at which point their contents are lost. Wouldn't it be nice if somehow the state of interesting objects could be saved and later restored, so that the program could maintain its state over multiple program invocations? Or even to convey the state of those objects to another program -- even on another machine?

Well, you can. This is called Object Persistence, and it's achieved in Java through a process called serialization.