Changing a class kills serialization
Here is the setup for something that I learnt today about Java. The app that I am working on uses serialized objects for part of the testing phase. However, today, the Class that these objects were based on was changed; two methods were added to the class. This resulted in the deserialization code throwing an Exception (I can’t remember which one).
The point of this is that if you serialize an object and then change the class that object is based on, the serialized object is useless. You can not deserialize it into the modified class.
If you are trying to hack together an application like we are, this is something to keep in mind. The change to the class was fairly minor, it resulted in two methods being added, but it still had some fairly major side affects.
