marshalling vs serialization

• Marshaling

Marshaling is process of encoding object to put them on the wire (network)
Unmarshaling is the process of decoding from the wire and placing object in the address space
RMI uses serialization (deserialization) to perform marshaling (Unmarshaling)

• Serialization

Serialization allows objects to be converted to a sequence of bytes
The sequence of bytes can be stored in a file, database, sent to a remote machine
The sequence of bytes can be used to recreate the original object


In particular, marshaling is about getting parameters from here to there, while serialization is about copying structured data to or from a primitive form such as a byte stream. In this sense, serialization is one means to perform marshaling, usually implementing pass-by-value semantics

• Deserializing

Recreating the object from the above generated bytes

http://www.eli.sdsu.edu/courses/spring98/cs696/notes/marsh/marsh.html