Dumping a Java program into a file and restarting it

Question

I was just wondering if it\'s possible to dump a running Java program into a file, and later on restart it (same machine)

It\'s sounds a bit weird, but who knows

Answer 1

What you want is impossible from the very nature of computer architecture.

Every Java program gets compiled into Java intermediate code and this code is then interpreted into into native platform code (when run). The native code is quite different from what you see in Java files, because it depends on underlining platform and JVM version. Every platform has different instruction set, memory management, driver system, etc... So imagine that you hibernated your program on Windows and then run it on Linux, Mac or any other device with JRE, such as mobile phone, car, card reader, etc... All hell would break loose.

You solution is to serialize every important object into files and then close the program gracefully. When "unhibernating", you deserialize these instances from these files and your program can continue. The number of "important" instances can be quite small, you only need to save the "business data", everything else can be reconstructed from these data. You can use Hibernate or any other ORM framework to automatize this serialization on top of a SQL database.