Serialization

Problem

Your application has an in-memory object: Customer { Name = "Alice" Age = 42 } You need to send it across a network. Memory objects cannot simply travel between processes.

Solution — Serialization

Convert the object into a transferable representation such as JSON or Protocol Buffers.

Object
  ↓ serialize
bytes
  ↓ network
deserialize
  ↓
Object

Core idea: serialization converts application data into a representation that can cross process boundaries.