A proxy used by a debugger to examine or manipulate some entity in another virtual machine. Mirror is the root of the interface hierarchy for this package. Mirrors can be proxies for objects in the target VM (ObjectReference), primitive values (for example, IntegerValue), types (for example, ReferenceType), dynamic application state (for example, StackFrame), and even debugger-specific constructs (for example, BreakpointRequest). The VirtualMachine itself is also considered a mirror, representing the composite state of the target VM.

There is no guarantee that a particular entity in the target VM will map to a single instance of Mirror. Implementors are free to decide whether a single mirror will be used for some or all mirrors. Clients of this interface should always use equals to compare two mirrors for equality.

Any method on a Mirror that takes a Mirror as an parameter directly or indirectly (e.g., as a element in a List) will throw VMMismatchException if the mirrors are from different virtual machines.