5.1 Overview

When Java^TM objects use serialization to save state in files, or as blobs in databases, the potential arises that the version of a class reading the data is different than the version that wrote the data.

Versioning raises some fundamental questions about the identity of a class, including what constitutes a compatible change. A compatible change is a change that does not affect the contract between the class and its callers.

This section describes the goals, assumptions, and a solution that attempts to address this problem by restricting the kinds of changes allowed and by carefully choosing the mechanisms.

The proposed solution provides a mechanism for "automatic" handling of classes that evolve by adding fields and adding classes. Serialization will handle versioning without class-specific methods to be implemented for each version. The stream format can be traversed without invoking class-specific methods.