Socket Programming Question:

Overview of Object Serialization
Object serialization is a mechanism that is useful in any program that wants to save the state of objects to a file and later read those objects to reconstruct the state of the program, or to send an object over the network using sockets. Serializing a class can be easily done simply by having the class implement the java.io.Serializable interface. This interface is a marker interface. In other words, it does not have any methods that need to be implemented by the class implementing it. It is mainly used to inform the Java virtual machine (JVM) that you want the object to be serialized.

There are two main classes that are used for reading and writing objects to streams: ObjectOutputStream and ObjectInputStream. The ObjectOutputStream provides the writeObject method for writing an object to an output stream, and the ObjectInputStream provides the readObject method for reading the object from an input stream. It is important to note that the objects used with these methods must be serialized. That is, their classes must implement the Serializable interface.