What is the difference between Serializable and Externalizable in Java?

Serialization provides default functionality to store and later recreate the object. It uses verbose format to define the whole graph of objects to be stored e.g. suppose you have a linkedList and you code like below, then the default serialization will discover all the objects which are linked and will serialize. In default serialization the object is constructed entirely from its stored bits, with no constructor calls.

  ObjectOutputStream oos = new ObjectOutputStream(
      new FileOutputStream("/Users/Desktop/files/temp.txt"));
  oos.writeObject(linkedListHead); //writing head of linked list
  oos.close();

But if you want restricted serialization or don’t want some portion of your object to be serialized then use Externalizable. The Externalizable interface extends the Serializable interface and adds two methods, writeExternal() and readExternal(). These are automatically called while serialization or deserialization. While working with Externalizable we should remember that the default constructer should be public else the code will throw exception. Please follow the below code:

public class MyExternalizable implements Externalizable
{

private String userName;
private String passWord;
private Integer roll;

public MyExternalizable()
{
}

public MyExternalizable(String userName, String passWord, Integer roll)
{
    this.userName = userName;
    this.passWord = passWord;
    this.roll = roll;
}

@Override
public void writeExternal(ObjectOutput oo) throws IOException 
{
    oo.writeObject(userName);
    oo.writeObject(roll);
}

@Override
public void readExternal(ObjectInput oi) throws IOException, ClassNotFoundException 
{
    userName = (String)oi.readObject();
    roll = (Integer)oi.readObject();
}

public String toString()
{
    StringBuilder b = new StringBuilder();
    b.append("userName: ");
    b.append(userName);
    b.append("  passWord: ");
    b.append(passWord);
    b.append("  roll: ");
    b.append(roll);
   
    return b.toString();
}
public static void main(String[] args)
{
    try
    {
        MyExternalizable m  = new MyExternalizable("nikki", "student001", 20);
        System.out.println(m.toString());
        ObjectOutputStream oos = new ObjectOutputStream(new FileOutputStream("/Users/Desktop/files/temp1.txt"));
        oos.writeObject(m);
        oos.close();
        
        System.out.println("***********************************************************************");
        ObjectInputStream ois = new ObjectInputStream(new FileInputStream("/Users/Desktop/files/temp1.txt"));
        MyExternalizable mm = (MyExternalizable)ois.readObject();
        mm.toString();
        System.out.println(mm.toString());
    } 
    catch (ClassNotFoundException ex) 
    {
        Logger.getLogger(MyExternalizable.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
    }
    catch(IOException ex)
    {
        Logger.getLogger(MyExternalizable.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
    }
}
}

Here if you comment the default constructer then the code will throw below exception:

 java.io.InvalidClassException: javaserialization.MyExternalizable;     
 javaserialization.MyExternalizable; no valid constructor.

We can observe that as password is sensitive information, so i am not serializing it in writeExternal(ObjectOutput oo) method and not setting the value of same in readExternal(ObjectInput oi). That’s the flexibility that is provided by Externalizable.

The output of the above code is as per below:

userName: nikki  passWord: student001  roll: 20
***********************************************************************
userName: nikki  passWord: null  roll: 20

We can observe as we are not setting the value of passWord so it’s null.

The same can also be achieved by declaring the password field as transient.

private transient String passWord;

Hope it helps. I apologize if i made any mistakes. Thanks.