Object serialization is also useful for distributed applications. Often you run into the trade-off between passing a reference to a remote object from one process to another or passing the object itself between processes. If the objects are not large, have static state, and will be accessed often, you may decide to send them by value between processes. Rather than writing custom network protocols to transmit application objects and writing code to read and write these protocols, you can use the Serialization package, which transmits serialized objects as blocks of raw data using generic protocols.