How must an object diagram look like?

Question

I searched the web, but I find a bunch of very different diagrams. Most of them don't even look like object diagrams. They have no object's value. I want to know how I must draw an object diagram in such a way, that my prof won't tell me it's absolutely wrong. Any good tutorial link is highly appreciated!

Answer 1

You're probably thinking of a class diagram, that shows the relationship between classes (not object instances), right?

UML (Unified Modeling Language) is the standard way of doing this.

Answer 2

Object diagrams tend to have limited use (they're usually working for other diagrams). I suspect you want a class or communication diagram. A class diagram will have fields but no values, while a communication diagram includes messages.

This is an object diagram. There is a more detailed description as part of this tutorial.

Read this page for the different uses of class diagrams, and this for a tutorial.

Here are two examples of communication diagrams.