Java Object Behavior Modeling and Visualization

Java developers need to know what a specific object did during a program run. Object behavior visualization can fulfill this requirement. This paper presents a novel object behavior model, a Lifetime Behavior Model (LBM) and visualization methods to provide deductive and inductive visualizations of Java object behavior. For the deductive visualization, this paper visualizes the object behavior by three different LBMTrees from thread, object interaction and method invocation view respectively. For the inductive visualization, this paper presents an Activity Spectrum Model (ASM) and a set of performance measurements based on the LBM. The visualization prototype is developed to access object behavior events by JVMPI, construct the models and visualize the models. Experiment shows that the results proposed here can provide comprehensive and clear understanding of Java object behaviors.