Must objects passed in a Mapped Record be Serializable?

Question

I understand that Record and MappedRecord implement Serializable. What about the objects we pass as parameters in the MappedRecord? Do they need to implement Serializable? We need to pass image data to our resource adapter, should we use a ByteBuffer (not Serializable) or a standard byte[]?
Thanks!

Answer 1

class ImageStack implements IsaStack {
public interface IsaStack{   
public void push(Object o);
public Object pop();
public Object peek();
I understand that a Stack (like a Vector ) can only
accept an Object, and thus primitives must be cast as
objects using their wrapper classes.This requirement is because of the interface IsaStack, which specifies the method signatures. In particular, since it specifies the return type of pop() and peek() as Object, you're required to cast even if you know that you're only returning Images (and even if you modify push() so that arbitrary objects can't be pushed.
So, the question becomes this: do you really need the interface? An interface gives you a way to abstract your data structures, but if you're always casting the returned values, you lose that abstraction.
You might be better off simply implementing ImageStack as a concrete class that deals with Images. If you want to maintain some level of flexibility, have it delegate the actual push/pop operations to a List, which you can then pass in the constructor.