Bobby Woolf

Often objects need to be serializable. This can be as easy as simply declaring that a class implements the Serializable interface. But just because an object says it's serializable doesn't necessarily mean that it will serialize (and deserialize) successfully. This article will explore what serialization is, how to prove that a purportedly serializable object can really be serialized, and how to redesign a nonserializable class to make it serializable. The first question is: What is serialization and why do objects need to be serializable? The Javadocs aren't much help; they say what java.io.Serializable does, but not what serialization is. To learn what it is, you must read the "Java Object Serialization Specification" in Sun's Object Serialization documentation (ht... (more)

An Introduction To Workflow and Workflow Management Systems

The Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), especially its Enterprise JavaBeans technology, provides an industry standard for the development of distributed enterprise applications. EJB helps solve a major problem: providing distributed access to persistent data. But it doesn't solve a related problem: modeling the business processes that applications use to access and manipulate tha... (more)