I have a Java class that is stored in an HttpSession object that's serialized and transfered between servers in a cluster environment. For the purpose of this explanation, lets call this class "Person".

While in the process of improving the code, this class was moved from "com.acme.Person" to "com.acme.entity.Person". Internally, the class remains exactly the same (same fields, same methods, same everything).

The problem is that we have two sets of servers running the old code and the new code at the same time. The servers with the old code have serialized HttpSession object and when the new code unserializes it, it throws a ClassNotFoundException because it can't find the old reference to com.acme.Person. At this point, it's easy to deal with this because we can just recreate the object using the new package. The problem then becomes that the HttpSession in the new servers, will serialize the object with the new reference to com.acme.entity.Person, and when this is unserialized in the servers running the old code, another exception will be thrown. At this point, we can't deal with this exception anymore.

What's the best strategy to follow for this kind of cases? Is there a way to tell the new servers to serialize the object with the reference to the old package and unserialize references to the old package to the new one? How would we transition to using the new package and forgetting about the old one once all servers run the new code?