Abstract: The invention relates to persistent object management and serialization. Serialization is minimized by only storing those objects that have been modified, created or deleted since the last save operation and not objects that are referenced by these modified objects. This is generally accomplished by keeping track, in an object persistence manager (120), of modified objects and storing, for each modified object, the object state together with identification of possible referenced objects in a persistent storage medium (140). At restoration, the objects are restored individually from the persistent storage (140). In order to restore the relationship between objects, the object persistence manager (120) is not only notified of completed restoration of individual objects, but also informed of which objects that are referenced and hence needed by the individually restored objects.