Building Java program analysis tools using Javana

Javana is a tool for creating customized Java program analysis tools. It comes with an easy-to-use instrumentation framework that enables programmers to develop profiling tools that crosscut the Java application, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the native execution layers. The goal of this poster is to demonstrate the power of Javana, using object lifetime computation as an example.Object lifetime has proven to be useful for analyzing and optimizing the behavior of Java applications. Computing object lifetime is conceptually simple, however, in practice it is often challenging. The JVM needs to be adjusted in numerous ways in order to track all possible accesses to all objects, including accesses that occur through the Java Native Interface (JNI), the standard class libraries, and the JVM implementation itself. Capturing all object accesses through manual instrumentation requires an in-depth understanding of the JVM and its libraries. We show that using Javana is both easier and more accurate than manual instrumentation.