Java Serializable Object to Byte Array

Let's say I have a serializable class AppMessage.

I would like to transmit it as byte[] over sockets to another machine where it is rebuilt from the bytes received.

How could I achieve this?

Prepare the byte array to send:

ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
ObjectOutputStream out = null;
try {
  out = new ObjectOutputStream(bos);   
  out.writeObject(yourObject);
  out.flush();
  byte[] yourBytes = bos.toByteArray();
  ...
} finally {
  try {
    bos.close();
  } catch (IOException ex) {
    // ignore close exception
  }
}

Create an object from a byte array:

ByteArrayInputStream bis = new ByteArrayInputStream(yourBytes);
ObjectInput in = null;
try {
  in = new ObjectInputStream(bis);
  Object o = in.readObject(); 
  ...
} finally {
  try {
    if (in != null) {
      in.close();
    }
  } catch (IOException ex) {
    // ignore close exception
  }
}

The best way to do it is to use SerializationUtils from Apache Commons Lang.

To serialize:

byte[] data = SerializationUtils.serialize(yourObject);

To deserialize:

YourObject yourObject = SerializationUtils.deserialize(data)

As mentioned, this requires Commons Lang library. It can be imported using Gradle:

compile 'org.apache.commons:commons-lang3:3.5'

Maven:

<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.commons/commons-lang3 -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.commons</groupId>
    <artifactId>commons-lang3</artifactId>
    <version>3.5</version>
</dependency>

Jar file

And more ways mentioned here

Alternatively, the whole collection can be imported. Refer this link

If you use Java >= 7, you could improve the accepted solution using try with resources:

private byte[] convertToBytes(Object object) throws IOException {
    try (ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
         ObjectOutputStream out = new ObjectOutputStream(bos)) {
        out.writeObject(object);
        return bos.toByteArray();
    } 
}

And the other way around:

private Object convertFromBytes(byte[] bytes) throws IOException, ClassNotFoundException {
    try (ByteArrayInputStream bis = new ByteArrayInputStream(bytes);
         ObjectInputStream in = new ObjectInputStream(bis)) {
        return in.readObject();
    } 
}