serializable and cloneable

[karthikbaskar]

can anyone explain about where to use serializable and cloneable. For what purpose a class should extend the above two.

[skoiloth]

the Serializable and Cloneable are marker interfaces. All of these marker interfaces do not define methods; instead, they identify a class as having a particular capability.

In the case of Serializable, the interface specifies that if the class is serialized using the serialization I/O classes, then a NotSerializableException will not be thrown (unless the object contains some other class that cannot be serialized). Cloneable similarly indicates that the use of the Object.clone() method for a Cloneable class will not throw a CloneNotSupportedException.

Serializable is just a "marker interface." It doesn't declare any methods. It's just a flag that other methods can check. DataOutputStream.writeObject checks whether the class implements Serializable, and throws and excpetion if it doesn't.