I am wondering what serialized mechanism should we choose when dealing with object transferring over the network. What are the pros and cons ?
I know most of the time we use JSON or XML for AJAX since the transfer format are pretty much Javascript format, and plus JSON is pretty lightweight with its small footprint, therefore is Java serialization totally out of the table ?
一般来说，重要的问题是哪个客户端将接收序列化的对象——浏览器/JavaScript引擎，如(node js)、Java客户端、未知/多个客户端.
JSON - JSON syntax is basically JavaScript and therefore any component with a JS engine will handle its parsing very well - even complicated data-structures will be converted to "living" objects efficiently. JSON parsers exist for practically any language and it is easy to use even when not using a JS engine, (Take Google Gson for example that is able to convert JSON into corresponding objects with ease) which makes is a good candidate for cross-language communication - for example in a messaging architecture.
XML- 共享JSON的许多好处-跨语言、轻量级等.例如，Adobe Flex处理XML非常好，甚至比JSON更好.对于json来说，这绝对是一个合适的替身.我个人更喜欢JSON，因为它类似于JS的语法，但是XML也很好.
Java序列化- 应仅考虑用于Java到Java通信.重要的一点是，class definitions应该在发送端和接收端，通常通过传递整个对象不会获得太多好处.我不排除RMI作为通信协议，它确实简化了开发.然而，由此产生的应用程序组件将是硬耦合的，这将使其很难替换.
One more notes - Serialization in general has its overhead. However when the communication is performed over a network the bottleneck is often the network rather than the serialization/deserialization itself.