Serialise
<programming> To represent an arbitrarily complex
data structure 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.
