Almost three decades have passed since the creation of Java Serialization—a feature which is widely frowned upon—and application requirements for externalization of objects have changed significantly.This presentation explains in which way requirements and constraints have changed, and how recent enhancements of the Java Language together with a simpler and clearer division of responsibilities can lead to a dramatically simpler, and safer, model for programmatically reasoning about the structure of Objects; offer greater flexibility in state extraction, versioning, encoding, and reconstruction; and, support a wide selection of wire formats.

Recorded at Devoxx Belgium 2025.