Imagine building a Lego car. You have all the different bricks and pieces put together to form the car. Serialization is like taking that Lego car apart and putting all the bricks into a box. You can then ship that box to someone else, and they can use the instructions (the serialization format) to rebuild the exact same car from the bricks.
Saving objects to files: You can serialize objects and save them to files on your hard drive, allowing you to load them back into your program later. Sending objects over a network: Serialization is essential for sending objects between different computers or applications, such as in web services or distributed systems. Storing objects in a database: Some databases allow you to store serialized objects, making it easier to persist complex data structures. Deserialization
The reverse process of serialization is called deserialization. This is where you take the serialized data (the stream of bytes) and reconstruct the original object in memory.
- JSON (JavaScript Object Notation): A human-readable text-based format widely used for data exchange on the web.
- XML (Extensible Markup Language): Another text-based format that uses tags to represent data.
- Binary formats: More compact and efficient formats that are not human-readable but can be faster to process.