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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-05T01:31:36+00:00

Is it possible to declare an instance of a serializable object in one Java

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Is it possible to declare an instance of a serializable object in one Java program / class, then repeat the definitions of the internal objects in a different program /class entirely, and load in a big complex object from a data file? The goal is to be able to write an editor for items that’s kept locally on my build machine, then write the game itself and distribute it to people who would like to play the game.

I’m writing a game in Java as a hobbyist project. Within my game, there’s an a family of classes that extend a parent class, GameItem. Items might be in various families like HealingPotion, Bomb, KeyItem, and so on.

class GameItem implements Serializable {
String ItemName
String ImageResourceLocation
....}

What I want to do is include definitions of how to create each item in a particularly family of items, but then have a big class called GameItemList, which contains all possible items that can occur as you play the game.

class GameItemList implements Serializable {
LinkedList<GameItem>gameItemList;
//methods here like LookUpByName, LookUpByIndex that return references to an item
}

Maybe at some point – as the player starts a new game, or as the game launches, do something like:

//create itemList
FileInputStream fileIn = new FileInputStream("items.dat");
ObjectInputStream in = new ObjectInputStream(fileIn);
GameItemList allItems = (GameItemList)in.readObject();
in.close();
//Now I have an object called allItems that can be used for lookups.

Thanks guys, any comments or help would be greatly appreciated.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    When you serialize an object, every field of the object is serialized, unless marked with transient. And this behavior is of course recursive. So yes, you can serialize an object, then deserialize it, and the deserialized object will have the same state as the serialized one. A different behavior would make serialization useless.

    I wouldn’t use native serialization for long-term storage of data, though. Serialized objects are hard to inspect, impossible to modify using a text editor, and maintaining backward compatibility with older versions of the classes is hard. I would use a more open format like XML or JSON.

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