byteorder of java objects

[Seth R Arnold <sarnold@willamette.edu>]

Greetings everyone,

I am in the designing stages of writing a cryptographic program in Java.
I would like to take instances of Object and encrypt them before sending
them to another Java client.

My question: can I run Objects through a method
encryptObjectUsingThisKey(Object o, Key k) on one computer, and send it
to another computer to be decrypted with
decryptObjectUsingThisKey(Object o, Key k) ?

Or, does this depend on the byteorder of the individual virtual
machines?

Or, should I perhaps be more interested in coming up with a stream
cipher that I could use in conjunction with the java streams?

Or, should I kluge bytes into strings into numbers to be played with
mathematically, and then strings sent over the network? (This might
allow better interoperation with clients programmed in other languages,
but sounds like a PITA otherwise. :)

Any and all thoughts are appreciated. :)

-- 
Seth Arnold | http://www.willamette.edu/~sarnold/
Hate spam? See http://maps.vix.com/rbl/ for help