I recently started developing in Java and have enjoyed the experience a lot. The default Java package comes loaded with useful things, and having the Swing package has been a great help creating a GUI. I decided to use SpringLayout for my LayoutManager because it was simple and extremely flexible, but now down the road I'm finding myself in a pickle.

I would like to be able to persist the state of my application. I started to approach this with use of the Preferences API, but that only allows for the storage of Java natives (understandable - its goal is to be lightweight). I went ahead and bastardized the use of Preferences by persisting XML strings packed with data. After a while, I decided to look around and see if there was anything better, and then I got around to reading about serializable - looked like I had found my answer.

I hit a snag, however, when I tried to serialize a class that had some GUI components that were managed by SpringLayout, which I have come to find does not implement serializable. I thought I'd found my way around the issue with the `transient` keyword, but SpringLayout's only allowable modifier is `final`. The only workaround I've seen is to change which LayoutManager I'm using... which I'd rather not do as I've created some fairly customized GUIs.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance for any and all responses.

-M