Magento – how to properly serialize / unserialize magento 2 models to json format

I'm trying to retrieve some data from a controller in a serialized format that I can unserialize later. For example, I have created an entity with the following data fields

MyEntity

• entity_id
• identifier
• created_at
• updated_at

In my controller's execution method I retrieve the list of results based on my criteria.

Now I would like to return a JSON response serialized object in this format

{result:[{'entity_id': 'id', 'identifier': 'identifier'},{...},{...}]}`

I'm trying to use the SerializerInterface to do this

serializer->serialize($item)

but serializing the entities gives empty values like this which is my first issue.

{"result":[{},{},{},{}]}

Later on, in another controller, I would have loved to do the following based on the results retrieved from the first controller which is my second issue.

unserialize($response->getBody()->getContents()->result)

And give me an array of MyEntity items

MyEntity[]

In Symfony, I can already do this using the serializer component which is very powerful and allows me to group attributes I want to expose and also ignore things I don't want to expose so I guess I'm looking for something similar. Is there a Magento 2 implementation for this?

https://symfony.com/doc/current/components/serializer.html

After further digging I noticed that the serializer for json executes a simple json_encode so there probably isn't any standard implementation for serializing/unserializing an object. The best I could do to serialize the Model was to implement in my model the \JsonSerializable interface like this

 public function jsonSerialize()
    {
        return [
          self::KEY_KEY => $this->getData(self::KEY_KEY),
          self::KEY_IDENTIFIER => $this->getData(self::KEY_IDENTIFIER),
          self::KEY_NAME => $this->getData(self::KEY_NAME),
          self::KEY_DESCRIPTION => $this->getData(self::KEY_DESCRIPTION),
        ];
    }

I would love to be able to utilize a framework method to do this though so I'm still looking for an answer to this as well as to how to decode the serialized string back to the Object's Class.