Serialization in Object-Oriented Programming Languages

This chapter depicts the process of converting object state into a format that can be transmitted or stored in currently used object-oriented programming languages. This process is called serialization (marshaling); the opposite is called deserialization (unmarshalling) processes. It is a low-level technique, and several technical issues should be considered like endianness, size of memory representation, representation of numbers, object references, recursive object connections and others. In this chapter we discuss these issues and give them solutions. We also include a short review of tools currently used, and we showed that meeting all requirements is not possible. Finally, we presented a new C++ library that supports forward compatibility.