Deep copy of Java objects

The class Object's clone method only performs a shallow copy. This means that it creates a new instance of the object but the fields of both the new and original object end up referencing the same objects because only the reference of the fields is copied to the new object. To make deep copies of an object, we can use this class:

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.ByteArrayInputStream;
import java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream;
import java.io.ObjectOutputStream;
import java.io.ObjectInputStream;

/**
 * Utility for making deep copies (vs. clone()'s shallow copies) of
 * objects. Objects are first serialized and then deserialized. Error
 * checking is fairly minimal in this implementation. If an object is
 * encountered that cannot be serialized (or that references an object
 * that cannot be serialized) an error is printed to System.err and
 * null is returned. Depending on your specific application, it might
 * make more sense to have copy(...) re-throw the exception.
 *
 * A later version of this class includes some minor optimizations.
 */
public class ObjectCloner {

    // so that nobody can accidentally create an ObjectCloner object
    private ObjectCloner() {
    }

    /**
     * Returns a copy of the object, or null if the object cannot
     * be serialized.
     */
    public static Object deepCopy(Object orig) {
        Object obj = null;
        try {
            // Write the object out to a byte array
            ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
            ObjectOutputStream out = new ObjectOutputStream(bos);
            out.writeObject(orig);
            out.flush();
            out.close();

            // Make an input stream from the byte array and read
            // a copy of the object back in.
            ObjectInputStream in = new ObjectInputStream(
                new ByteArrayInputStream(bos.toByteArray()));
            obj = in.readObject();
        }
        catch(IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        catch(ClassNotFoundException cnfe) {
            cnfe.printStackTrace();
        }
        return obj;
    }
}

Sample call: Object clone = ObjectCloner.deepCopy(oldObject);
A more optimized version can be found here: http://javatechniques.com/blog/faster-deep-copies-of-java-objects/