Hello,
In response to the recent and on-going review of serializable types in
the base module and elsewhere, I thought it would be helpful if the
collections specs discussed how collections were serialiazable. In
particular, the proposed terminology is that a collection is
"conditionally serializable" if the collection type implements
java.io.Serializable and all the elements of the collections are
serializable.
Candidate wording changes to java.util.Collection below. If this notion
is deemed useful, I can also go through and add "This collection is
conditionally serializable."notes to ArrayList, HashMap, and other such
collections.
Thoughts?
Thanks,
-Joe
--- a/src/java.base/share/classes/java/util/Collection.java Tue Oct 01
20:07:30 2019 -0700
+++ b/src/java.base/share/classes/java/util/Collection.java Wed Oct
02 22:58:04 2019 -0700
@@ -188,6 +188,17 @@
* or if the only reference to the backing collection is through an
* unmodifiable view, the view can be considered effectively immutable.
*
+ * <h2><a id="condserial">Serializable Collections</a></h2>
+ *
+ * Many collection types implement {@link
+ * java.io.Serializable}. Typically such collections are
+ * <i>conditionally serializable</i>, if all the objects in the
+ * collection are serializable, the collection as a whole can be
+ * serialized. Otherwise, is one or more objects in a collection are
+ * <em>not<em> serializable, the collection cannot be serialized and a
+ * {@link java.io.NotSerializableException} may be thrown on attempts
+ * to serialize such a collection.
+ *
* <p>This interface is a member of the
* <a
href="{@docRoot}/java.base/java/util/package-summary.html#CollectionsFramework">
* Java Collections Framework</a>.
