I'm considering message serialization support for spring-integration. This would be useful for various wire level transports to implement guaranteed delivery, but also to allow interoperability with other messaging systems (e.g. through AMQP).

The fundamental problem that arises is that a message containing Java object in it's payload and headers should be converted to a byte[] and/or written to a stream. Java's own serialization is clearly not going to cut it because that is not interoperable. My preference would be to create an interface that allows the user to implement the needed logic for all Objects that take part in serialization. Is this a sensible idea and what would the interface look like? Is there a standard interoperable way to serialize Objects that would make sense in this context?