The basic idea of serialization is that an object should be able to write its current state, usually indicated by the value of its member variables, to persistent storage. Later, the object can be re-created by reading, or deserializing, the object�s state from the storage. Serialization handles all the details of object pointers and circular references to objects that are used when you serialize an object. A key point is that the object itself is responsible for reading and writing its own state. Thus, for a class to be serializable, it must implement the basic serialization operations. As shown in the Serialization group of articles, it is easy to add this functionality to a class.