Object (de)serlialisation to/from file in Scala

This wasn’t as simple as I expected it to be. It’s easy to dump objects file in a human-readable format (via java.io.FileWriter), later reading and parsing the Strings back into Objects. But “proper” serialisation is a bit trickier, and not especially well-documented. After a bit of poking around, my working solution is this:

To write:

import scala.actors.remote.JavaSerializer
import java.io.DataOutputStream
import java.io.FileOutputStream

val js = new JavaSerializer(null, null)
val os = new DataOutputStream(new FileOutputStream("foo"))

val list = List(1,2,3)
println(list(2))

js.writeObject(os, list)
os.close()

And, to read:

import scala.actors.remote.JavaSerializer
import java.io.DataInputStream
import java.io.FileInputStream

val js = new JavaSerializer(null, null)
val is = new DataInputStream(new FileInputStream("foo"))

val list = js.readObject(is).asInstanceOf[List[Int]]
println(list(2))

is.close()

That feels a bit hackish though. Perhaps there’s a neater way of doing this?