REDUNDANCY ELIMINATION IN THE PERSISTENCE OF OBJECT GRAPHS

A method and system for incrementally serializing an object graph to a persistent form. An object graph is a set of nested objects, each with one or more properties. An object graph in a first environment is serialized to a temporary serialized form. At substantially the same time, the temporary serialized form is read into a second environment and deserialized in the second environment. By deserializing instantiation statements taken from the temporary form, a copy of the object graph is created in the second environment, wherein the objects have default values. For each object, only statements in the temporary serialized form that would alter the second environment are maintained in a final serialized form. The properties of classes are accessed through public APIs to avoid reliance on private implementations of classes. Therefore, serialized forms will typically still be deserializable even when private implementations are different across different platforms or across the same platform over time. Incremental serialization also includes error recovery and mechanisms to handle several special cases.