When and why JPA entities should implement the Serializable interface?

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The question is in the title. Below I just described some of my thoughts and findings.

When I had a very simple domain model (3 tables without any relations), all my entities did NOT implement the Serializable interface.

But when the domain model became more complex, I got a RuntimeException, saying that one of my entities didn’t implement Serializable.

I use Hibernate as a JPA implementation, and I wonder:

  1. Is it a vendor-specific requirement/behavior?
  2. What happens with my serializable entities? Should they be serializable for storing or for transferring?
  3. At which moment it becomes necessary to make my entity serializable?

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