serialise

programming To represent an arbitrarily complex datastructure in a location-independent way so that it can be

communicated or stored elsewhere.

For example, an object representing a time, with

attributes for year, month, timezone, etc., could be

serialised as the string "2002-02-24T14:33:52-0800", or an

XML element "dateobj year='2002' month='02' day='24'

hour='14' minute='33' second='52' timezone='-0800' /", or as

a binary string.

As well as providing an external data representation

(e.g. representing an integer as a string of ASCII

digits) and marshalling components into a single block of

data, a serialisation algorithm needs to follow pointers

to include objects referred to by the initial object. This is

further complicated by the possible presence of cycles in the

object graph.

It should be possible to store the serialised representation

on disk, or transmit it across a network, and then restore it

as an object (graph) that is the same as the original.

(2001-09-28)