title: Serialization, evolution of a class
body: <p>I need to serial an object and store it on disk.  I used Java's built in and that works fine, as long as the class doesn't change to much. If I start mucking around with the class it can stop working.</p>
  
  <p>What options are available here?  Basically if we have an update I don't want to break all the user's data files.</p>
  
  <p>So far I've tried serialization to XML (has same problems).  Also tried to 'hand roll' a config/data file.  Basically spit everything out into XML, load it and then create a NEW object based off the config file.  This seems to work well, but would take forever to convert everything over to this since it's a lot of manual work.</p>
  
  <p>Any other options?</p>