Serializable is a marker interfaces that tells the JVM it can write out the state of the object to some stream (basically read all the members, and write out their state to a stream, or to disk or something). The default mechanism is a binary format. You can also use it to clone things, or keep state between invocations, send objects across the network etc.
You can let eclipse generate one for you (basically just a long random but unique ID). That means you can control when you think a class would be compatible with a serialized version, or not.
(Note: that all the non transient member variables must be of a serializable class, or you will get an error - as the JVM will recurse through the structure writing out the state of each object down to the level of writing primitives to the ObjectOutputStream).
