Serialized

Serialized describes something presented in a sequence of installments or divided into discrete parts. In publishing and storytelling, serialized works are published chapter by chapter or episode by episode, often to build anticipation and sustain audience engagement. Historically, magazines and newspapers carried serialized fiction; authors such as Charles Dickens popularized the form. In modern media, serialization appears in television series, web serials, podcasts, and digital comics, with narrative pacing designed to carry a story across installments.

In computing, serialization is the process of converting an in-memory data structure or object into a format suitable for storage or transmission, and later restoring it through deserialization. Common textual formats include JSON, XML, and YAML; binary formats include Protocol Buffers, Thrift, MessagePack, and language-specific forms such as Java serialization or Python pickle. The choices balance readability, size, speed, and cross-language compatibility. Important considerations include schema evolution, backward compatibility, security (notably deserialization vulnerabilities), and how to handle missing or extra fields.

Serialization enables persistence, inter-process communication, remote procedure calls, caching, and data exchange between heterogeneous systems. Differences exist between text-based and binary schemes, and between self-describing formats versus schema-based ones that require a defined schema to interpret data. The term marshal or marshal/unmarshal is sometimes used interchangeably with serialize/deserialize in certain ecosystems.