Efficient object serialization in Java

Object serialization is the ability of an object to write a complete state of itself and of any objects that it references to an output stream, so that it can be recreated from the serialized representation at a later time. Pickling, the process of creating a serialized representation of objects, has been investigated for many years in the context of many different distributed systems. Sun Microsystems introduced a simple and extendible API for object serialization in version 1.1 of the Java Development Kit. Application developers can use this standard serialization in their applications, or they can develop custom versions for different user-defined classes. Many distributed applications that use standard serialization to communicate between distributed nodes, experience significant degradation in performance due to large sites of serialized objects. We present a number of improvements to the serialization mechanism aimed at decreasing pickle sizes without visible degradation in serialization performance. Through performance results, we show that it produces pickles up to 50% smaller without degrading serialization performance.