10 Java Serialization Questions for Interviews

My favorite Java Serialization Interview questions with answers

Java Serialization is one of the important concepts but it’s been rarely used as a persistence solution and developers mostly overlooked Java serialization API.

As per my experience, Java Serialization is quite an important topic in any core Java interview, In almost all the interviews I have faced there are one or two Java serialization questions and I have seen an interview where after a few questions on serialization candidate start feeling uncomfortable because of lack of experience in this area. 

They don’t know How to serialize an object in Java or they are not familiar with any Java Serialization example to explain, forget about questions like how Serialization works in Java,  Difference between transient and volatile variables.

How many methods Serializable interface has? what is the marker interface? what is the purpose of the marker interface? What is the difference between Externalizable and Serializable in Java, or after the introduction of annotation, why not java replaced Serializable with @Serializable annotation or?

In this article, we will question from both beginner and advanced levels, which can be equally beneficial to freshers, newcomers, and senior Java developers with some years of Java development experience.

By the way, if you are preparing for Java interviews, you can also checkout my books, Grokking the Java Interview and Grokking the Spring Boot, where I have shared frequently asked Java interview questions. You can also use code friends50 to get 50% discount for next few days.

10 Interview questions on Serialization in Java

The most commercial project uses either database or memory-mapped file or simply flat file for there persistence requirement and only a few of them rely on serialization process in Java.