hi,
The app engine JDO documentation goes into this in more detail-- take a look at the discussion of the field types.
A serialized field is stored as a blob property. You can use it to set a field of your instance to some (serializable) object, with the serialization and deserialization handled for you. Blob values are not indexed and cannot be used in query filters or sort orders.
You might want to use a serialized field if you have an object that should be part of an entity, and is not a 'core type' (or supported collection), and whose contents don't need to be indexed-- in that case it's often simplest to just serialize it wholesale.
If your field is a core type (like Integer), you don't need to serialize it -- just annotate it as 'unindexed' if you don't want it indexed.