22. What is the main difference between shallow cloning and deep cloning of objects

The default behaviour of an object’s clone() method automatically yields a shallow copy. So to achieve a deep copy the classes must be edited or adjusted.

Shallow copy: If a shallow copy is performed on obj-1 as shown in fig-2 then it is copied but its contained objects are not. The contained objects Obj-1 and Obj-2 are affected by changes to cloned Obj-2. Java supports shallow cloning of objects by default when a class implements the java.lang.Cloneable interface.

Deep copy: If a deep copy is performed on obj-1 as shown in fig-3 then not only obj-1 has been copied but the objects contained within it have been copied as well. Serialization can be used to achieve deep cloning. Deep cloning through serialization is faster to develop and easier to maintain but carries a performance overhead.

For example, invoking clone() method on a HashMap returns a shallow copy of HashMap instance, which means the keys and values themselves are not cloned. If you want a deep copy then a simple method is to serialize the HashMap to a ByteArrayOutputSream and then deserialize it. This creates a deep copy but does require that all keys and values in the HashMap are Serializable. Its primary advantage is that it will deep copy any arbitrary object graph.

List some of the methods supported by Java object class? clone(), toString(), equals(Object obj), hashCode(), wait(), notify(), finalize() etc.