All serialization systems seem to be not so great. Neither pickle in python nor marshal in ruby. All come with certain restrictions e. g. unable to store all properties of an object. I assume this to be not that dissimilar to java. More on reddit.com

It's fast but at 246 source files (476 classes) it's not light.

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Let's say you are creating a game in Java and you want to add the ability for the player to save it, and to load already saved game. One way to implement this is with Java serialization. It gives you the ability to convert a group of connected objects to a byte stream, which you can save in a file. Loading can then be implemented by reading this file and de-serializing the bytes back to Java objects. Or, in another use-case, you can send the byte-stream over the network to another process. This was the basis of Java RPC (Remote Procedure Call). There are many pitfalls and problems with the way Java serialization is implemented. For example, the loader needs to have access to all the needed classes, to be able to deserialize the objects. And the classes have to be the same version or you need to make sure they are compatible. Generally the Java Serialization API is quite brittle and last I checked, Oracle was planning to remove it from future versions of Java. Some of the alternatives to the Java Serialization API are serializing to JSON or XML using libraries like Jackson, GSON, etc. There are also Google's Protocol Buffers or similar approaches. Saving and loading objects in a database has also a lot in common with this, so for some use-cases one may choose that approach. More on reddit.com