Persistence

When you create an object, it exists for as long as you need it, but under no circumstances
does it exist when the program terminates. While this makes sense at first, there are
situations in which it would be incredibly useful if an object could exist and hold its
information even while the program wasn’t running. Then the next time you started the
program, the object would be there and it would have the same information it had the
previous time the program was running. Of course you can get a similar effect now by
writing the information to a file or to a database, but in the spirit of making everything an
object it would be quite convenient to be able to declare an object persistent and have all the
details taken care of for you.
Java 1.1 provides support for “lightweight persistence,” which means that you can easily
store objects on disk and later retrieve them. The reason it’s “lightweight” is that you’re still
forced to make explicit calls to do the storage and retrieval. In some future release more
complete support for persistence might appear.