Serialization in java

Question: What are the uses of Serialization?

Answer: In some types of applications you have to write the code to serialize objects, but in many cases serialization is performed behind the scenes by various server-side containers.

These are some of the typical uses of serialization:

To persist data for future use.
To send data to a remote computer using such client/server Java technologies as RMI or socket programming.
To "flatten" an object into array of bytes in memory.
To exchange data between applets and servlets.
To store user session in Web applications .
To activate/passivate enterprise java beans.
To send objects between the servers in a cluster