CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xmlserialization
Rakshan Premsagar Kapikad
Rakshan Premsagar Kapikad

Reputation: 409

What exactly is serialisation?

I have concerns understanding serialisation. When I come across serialisation, I understand it as converting to string. For eg: XML serialisation : converting XML object to a string object.

is it correct? Please help me understand

Upvotes: 0

Views: 98

Answers (2)

Talita
Talita

Reputation: 190

A "dumbed" down definition will be:

"In computing, serialization or serialisation is the process of translating a data
structure or object state into a format that can be stored or transmitted
and reconstructed later"

This applies to every framework and/or language.

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serialization

Good answers with examples: What is Serialization?

Upvotes: 1

Michael Kay
Michael Kay

Reputation: 163458

Unfortunately the term is used in a number of different senses.

In the XML world, serialization generally means the opposite of parsing: whereas parsing converts from lexical representation of XML (using angle brackets) to a tree structure in memory, serialization converts the tree back to lexical XML.

In the world of Java and other languages such as C#, serialization means converting any set of objects in memory to a string representation (generally not XML) that can later be used to reconstitute the objects (the reverse process is called deserialisation).

The two come together when you're using XML data binding technologies to map XML to Java or C# objects. In this case getting from objects to an XML representation is known as marshalling, and the reverse is called unmarshalling.

Upvotes: 1

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