Can a transient variable be serialized in any way?

Question

I faced this question in an interview. Please help me to find the answer. The question was Can a transient variable be serialized in any way?

Answer 1

static and transient fields are not serialized by default.

However they can be serialized if

• the same object is accessible via a serialized field.
• the object is serialized in a readObject/writeObject or readExternalizable/writeExternalizable.
• you are using a different serialization library with different rules (I don't know any which serializes static fields, though I have written such a library by mistake once)

Usually a field is made transient to mean it shouldn't be serialized, though sometimes it might be because

• the type is not Serializable
• you don't want to use the default Serialization.