— Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems Chairman, President and ceo

puzzle 
answers

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this is a new chapter
429
14

serialization 
and 
file I/O
Objects can be flattened and inflated. 
Objects have state and behavior. 
Behavior lives in the class, but state lives within each individual object. So what happens when 
it’s time to save the state of an object? If you’re writing a game, you’re gonna need a Save/
Restore Game feature. If you’re writing an app that creates charts, you’re gonna need a Save/
Open File feature. If your program needs to save state, you can do it the hard way, interrogating 
each object, then painstakingly writing the value of each instance variable to a file, in a 
format you create. Or, you can do it the easy OO way—you simply freeze-dry/flatten/persist/
dehydrate the object itself, and reconstitute/inflate/restore/rehydrate it to get it back. But you’ll 
still have to do it the hard way sometimes, especially when the file your app saves has to be read 
by some other non-Java application, so we’ll look at both in this chapter.
If I have to read 
one more fi le full of 
data, I think I’ll have to kill him. He 
knows I can save whole objects, but 
does he let me? 
NO, that would be 
too easy. Well, we’ll just see how 
he feels after I...
Saving Objects
Make it Stick

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chapter 14
You’ve made the perfect pattern. You want to save the pattern. 
You could grab a piece of paper and start scribbling it down, but 
instead you hit the Save button (or choose Save from the File 
menu). Then you give it a name, pick a directory, 
and exhale knowing that your masterpiece won’t go 
out the window with the blue screen of death. 
You have lots of options for how to save the state of 
your Java program, and what you choose will probably 
depend on how you plan to use the saved state. Here 
are the options we’ll be looking at in this chapter.