What is Serializable and Parcelable?

[Ashish Bisht]

Hi everyone, i am an Android developer and want to know your views on Serializable and Parcelable. Which is best approach in Android that will be helpful for me ?

 

[QuantumQuest]

Serializable is a marker interface, that you implement on a class and its children. The downside of this approach is that it's slow and creates a lot of temporary objects.

Parcelable is a more specialized interface, which is significantly faster than Serializable. The downside is that you have to write some - enough in many cases, boilerplate code.

Everything has its cost. If you can afford the time , then it's better to use Parcelable. On the other hand, in most cases the slowness of Serializable - that is due to reflection that is used, won't be particularly noticeable, so you can write significantly less code and be OK. In general, you have to judge yourself on a per case basis, if it worths the extra time or not.

I strongly recommend to look up Android documentation, in order to have a complete view about the two choices.

 

[BvU]

Hello Ashish,

+1 for QQ. But I wonder why -- as an android aficionado -- you didn't simply google 'serializable vs parcelable' and ended up with D Phil ?

 

[Ashish Bisht]

Thank you everyone for valuable suggestion.