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programming To represent an arbitrarily complex
datastructure 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
As well as providing an external data representation
digits) and
marshalling components into a single block of
to include objects referred to by the initial object. This is
further complicated by the possible presence of cycles in the
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.
(2001-09-28)