A nice thing to have is an ant task to convert from .ser to .xml and back.

* good for debugging
* it could be used for axis - too many times existing classes have problem with
the serialization scheme based on getters.
* this would allow same code to work with both RMI/IIOP and soap
* it may solve some of the .ser problem - like versioning and unreadability.

The serial file does not include a lot of metadata - that is part of the class file. Storing this metadata ( only the field descriptors, to allow interpreting the .ser file ) would also be nice.

The speed of reading/writting .ser file is almost 2x of SAX - and involves almost no garbage ( compared with hundreds of objects per request ). The size is also much smaller - assuming transient is used correctly.

There are many bad things in RMI - and in java.io.Serialization, but some things are also very nice.