Reactions to Two Software Approaches for Object Persistence

Persistence is the mechanism to extend the lifetime of an arbitrary software object beyond the execution of the application that creates the object. In this study we observed student’s reactions to two specific preservation schemes: Java JDK serialization (JS), and Google’s Json-based serialization (JSON). We instructed a group of undergraduate students on the two previous preservation strategies. Our subjects were asked to write a program to persist (encode-write-read-decode cycle) a sequence of common object patterns using JS and JSON, and identify one of the two approaches as their preferred strategy for future use. Three weeks later the students took an unannounced exam containing two serialization problems. The retention test indicates that not only a larger number of students still preferred JSON over JS, but also the correctness of their solutions was significantly higher than that of classic JS. A primer on JSON encoding is provided as an appendix.