> I would like to know if "Pickling" the class object is the only way of
> writing it to disk for persistent storage. Also, do we have a concept
> similar to "array of objects" in Python? The number of objects is only
> known at "run-time".

Have a look at YAML.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/syck/

Also it is possible to persist python data to and from XML. See
xml.marshal.generic.dumps