Effective Java: A Programming Language Guide (Java Series)

by Bloch Joshua

Item 78: Consider serialization proxies instead of serialized instances

Even better, completely separate objects from their serialization/serializers. That is, have a separate object(s) that know how to take the serialized form and create/output the object (deserializer) and the reverse (serializer). This keeps your object itself nice and clean, and also allows you to more cleanly have several serialized forms of an object (e.g. JSON and XML).