Marshalling (computer science)

In computer science, marshalling or marshaling is the process of transforming the memory representation of an object to a data format suitable for storage or transmission, and it is typically used when data must be moved between different parts of a computer program or from one program to another. Marshalling is similar to serialization and is used to communicate to remote objects with an object, in this case a serialized object. It simplifies complex communication, using custom/complex objects to communicate instead of primitives. The opposite, or reverse, of marshalling is called unmarshalling (or demarshalling, similar to deserialization).