Question

I need to persist several classes with A LOT of static fields (which are arrays filled & modified during the runtime). It would take a lot of effort to convert from static fields to instance vars, so I’d rather go for a quick solution, if any.

So far the path of least resistance is to cook my own writeObject() for each class.

Alternatively, i dont need Serialization as such – any mechanism to store/load an object from persistent storage will do. E.g. XMLDecoder to decompose the bean objects, etc.

Answer 1

You could write a method to use reflection to serialize all static methods. A static method can be marked transient which would normally be redundant, but you could use this to highlight static fields you don’t want to serialize. You can call this method from your writeObject() to save you having to do this for every field.