Saving current state of GUI to be opened later

How would I go about doing this? I have a program with a lot of objects (JButtons, JLists, Tabs, etc.) that I need to be able to save to a file during any time that my program is running and then be able to reopen the program and load the saved GUI. Afterwards, it still needs to be editable (meaning all of the objects eventhandler's and what not still function).

1) You could write a custom format, evaluate the state and save to file. Then read that state when you reopen. 2) You can serialize the objects. See
Serializable (Java Platform SE 6)