How to Serialize/Deserialize an object without implementing Serializable interface?

Question

If a mail is send to my inbox, I recieve a message, and I'm inserting the contents into DB. I have a org.springframework.integration.core.Message something like follows:

public void receive(Message<?> message)
{
    //I am inserting message contents into DB
}

Now in the event of failure, I wanted to have fail safe recovery mechanism, what I am thinking is to serialize the Message object into a file and later deserialize and update to DB.

Question 1. In this situation how to serialize the Message object? 2. Other than serialization any other mechanism that can be used?

EDIT I have not done Serialization before, I heard like the class should implements Serializable in order to use ObjectOutputStream, in this case I don't want to create a subclass of Message, So how to serialize Message to File?

Answer 1

Sure, there are many serialization mechanisms apart from the jvm one.

• XML
• JSON
• BSON
• MessagePack
• protobufs
• ...

Some of them are text-based, some are binary. All have drawbacks and pluses. Text-based ones are human-readable, binary ones are faster and take up less space.

There are java libraries that handle all the above formats: JAXB (XML), Jackson (JSON), etc.

Answer 2

In this situation how to serialize the Message object? Other than serialization any other mechanism that can be used?

Extract all the data you need from the Message and save it. You can do this in any manner you choose.

You can deserialize it by populating a new Message with the data you saved.