deep copying a graph structure

Yep, deep copy in java ( not only in java) can be made using memory serialization/deserialization like this

public static Object copy(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;
    }

The problem is that you need to copy the identities of the nodes, not just their values. Specifically, when you're copying some node, you need to deal with the identities of the nodes it refers to; that means that a copy constructor, or some other kind of purely local copying mechanism, can't do the job, because it only deals with one node at a time. I'm not sure that makes any sense, but I've typed it and my backspace key doesn't work.

Anyway, what you can do is pass around some other object which can tell which new node corresponds to which old node. If you wanted to be fancy (and who doesn't?) you could refer to this as a graph isomorphism. This can be something as simple as a map. As in this completely untested code:

// in Graph
public Graph deepCopy () {
  Graph g = new Graph();
  g.nodes = new ArrayList<Node>();
  Map<Node, Node> isomorphism = new IdentityHashMap<Node, Node>();
  for (Node n : nodes) { 
    g.nodes.add(n.deepCopy(isomorphism));
  }
  return g;
}

// in Node
public Node deepCopy(Map<Node, Node> isomorphism) {
    Node copy = isomorphism.get(this);
    if (copy == null) {
        copy = new Node();
        isomorphism.put(this, copy);
        for (Node connection: connections) {
            copy.connections.add(connection.deepCopy(isomorphism));
        }
    }
    return copy;
}

Sergii mentions using serialization; serialization actually does something pretty similar when it traverses an object graph.