This really threw me off for a while (cf https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23748254/storing-a-kryo-object-in-a-compiled-jar ).

I had a HashMap I needed to persist and have fast access to. I used Kryo to serialize the object

Kryo kryo = new Kryo();
MapSerializer serializer = new MapSerializer();
kryo.register(Location.class);
kryo.register(HashMap.class, serializer);

Output output = new Output(new FileOutputStream("src/main/resources/locations50K.kryo"));
kryo.writeObject(output, locationMap);
output.close();

I successfully deserialized with

Input input = new Input(new FileInputStream("src/main/resources/locations50K.kryo"));
Map<String, Location> locationMap;
locationMap = kryo.readObject(input, HashMap.class);
input.close();

log.info(locationMap.size());

the log.info showed 231,045 entries in my map.

Now, in order to access the .kryo file after compiling a *-jar-with-dependencies.jar (using Maven) I needed to replace FileInputStream with MyClass.class.getResourceAsStream

InputStream isr = MyClass.class.getResourceAsStream("/locations50K.kryo");

if(isr == null)
  log.error("null input");

Input input = new Input(isr);
locationMap = kryo.readObject(input, HashMap.class);
input.close();

log.info(locationMap.size());

the log.error never showed and the log.info said I had 0 entries in my map. Why? isr was never null so it read something, Kryo just can’t seem to deserialize it and never provided any error.

Well,

Turns out the problem was with Maven. I had “filtering” enabled so Maven was trying to utf8 encode my serialized objects in the jar. Kryo was silent about it but rewriting the code to use standard Java serialization gave the error found here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/5421992/424631. Kryo should probably have warned rather than failed silently (and I should probably make a JIRA…).

Here is the fix:

<resources>
  <resource>
    <directory>src/main/resources</directory>
      <!--if true Maven will try to UTF-8 encode objects, which breaks deserialization-->
        <filtering>false</filtering>
  </resource>
</resources>