The following are enhancements to serialization in Java SE Development Kit 6 (JDK).
For a summary of enhancements in previous releases, see Enhancements
in Previous Releases.
java.io.ObjectStreamClass.lookupAny
In previous releases, it was difficult to programmatically obtain
an ObjectStreamClass instance for a non-serializable
Class, although doing so can be desirable when
customizing the stream format for class descriptors (see 4413615
for more information). The new method ObjectStreamClass.lookupAny
can now be used for this purpose.
Bug fix: delayed garbage collection
In previous releases, bug 6232010
could cause serializable classes and subclasses of
ObjectOutputStream and ObjectInputStream to
be strongly referenced long after their use in a serialization
operation, thus possibly delaying garbage collection of their defining
class loaders indefinitely. Internal caches in the serialization
implementation have been restructured to fix this bug.