In one of my recent courses, we talked about Java 5 annotations. I told my students that before that time, one had to use marker interface instead: an interface without any method. Then, I showed the Serializable interface as an example. I started to explain it, then realized I would need a lot of time to fully cover it. This post is an attempt at that. Serialization is the process of transforming an existing in-memory Java object to a stream of bytes. That stream can then be transferred over t