I recommend you to take a look at SOAP prototcol which basically does exactly what you want.



There are many SOAP implementations, for the Java part you may use the opensource product oferred by Apache (Apache SOAP or AXIS). For the C part you may write your own implementation based on SOAP specification or maybe you'll find something available as opensource.



These implementation will do the serialization / deserialization process for you (based on XML), the only thing you need is to understand the SOAP technology and the API.



Please see:

http://xml.apache.org/soap/index.html

http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/

Well, Java's serialization doesn't work with C code, so you have to go for something more universal. A common solution is XML.

You could pass XML documents describing the objects' state and create applicable object instances from that information.

Take a look at data-binding tutorials around the net. JavaWorld has some, I think.