What is Marshalling

In RPC, an IDL is similar to a header file in C. IDL generates client stub and server skeleton, a piece of C code compiled and linked edit into the host programs. The stub converts paramters into a string of bits and sends message over the network. The skeleton does the reverse. The process of converting parameters to message is called marshalling. The advantage of marshalling is that it handles differing data format between the client and the server (e.g. 32-bit on client and 64-bit on server). Serialization is to take an object and convert it to a message to be stored on disk or sent over the network.