>>52
portable serialization of objects for transmission across networks is a faily basic and universal need. It's good to have a library where you can just do
connection.send(obj); on one end and
connection.recieve(obj); on the other. This is just one method to obtain that, and it comes with the advantage of not having to do work to keep it up to date with changes made to the objects. But with any case in automation, there is potential for abuse, like storing fields you don't need, as you mentioned. But I think the solution to that is to carefully design the objects to only store what is needed in the file, or what is needed for transmission, etc. The object should be seen as a mandable container for the contents of the file, or transmission. This approach could be used to implement any file format that has a consistent structure. XML is fairly easy. And binary files that consist of several items, one after the other, can also be generated and read this way.
Have you heard of ASN.1?
nope. What is it?