What is object marshalling?

Question

I have heard this concept used frequently, but I don\'t have a really good grasp of what it is.

Answer 1

Basically it's an expression for generically transforming an object (or similar) into another representation that (e.g.) can be sent over the wire or stored to disk (typically string or binary stream. The opposite, unmarshalling, describes the opposite direction of reading the marshalled representation and re-creating an object or whatever in-memory-structure existed earlier.

Another current everyday example is JSON