This Bugzilla instance is a read-only archive of historic NetBeans bug reports. To report a bug in NetBeans please follow the project's instructions for reporting issues.
I would like to see a unified Thread and Call stack view in NetBeans debugger. The Call stack frames should be shown as children of the suspended Thread's node. The Call stack frames should show the declaring type as well as the actual type of the 'this' variable for non-static methods.
It was done that way in the past - see http://debuggercore.netbeans.org/UI/UserView.html#4 I do not know all details of why it was changed to the current state, but IMHO the UI experts decided to split it into two views as it is now. An extra call stack view is good for cases when you do not want to be disturbed by other threads (which is the majority of cases IMHO). We'll consider this enhancement in the upcoming UI redesign...
I see. I have used Eclipse and I like the unified Thread and Call stack view. This is because this view can fit in a vertical form factor (tall window). Especially if the a column for thread suspnded state column could be replaced by a badged icon. The same could be done to the Thread State column. I think local variables should be in a separate window though. That is because the local variables view fits better in a horizontal form factor (wide window) - many coulmns, detail view of the selected row for long values (I know this is not there in NetBeans - I like this feature in Eclipse debugger) etc. Also grouping by thread groups or not could be a user option. This may be a separate enhancement request though.
Something like: http://plugins.netbeans.org/PluginPortal/faces/PluginDetailPage.jsp?pluginid=4152
This is being worked on for 6.5. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 51758 ***
I just wanted to add a note here for historical reference. I was among those who helped produce the UI design for the debugger in NB as it stands. The reason the threads and call stack got separated into separate views were for a couple reasons. As was seen in the picture mentlicher put a link to, in the past everything in the NB debugger was done as a tree, including local variables. Things that have multiple fields/properties tend to work poorly there (e.g. with variables, you had name, data type, current value, and conceivably more, all in a tree) because it is difficult to scan through the information and find information (e.g. the current value of each variable was at an unpredictable horizontal offset, making it disturbingly slow to locate information). At the time, there was also a goal to get a single general debugger interface which could support a variety of underlying debuggers, and some debuggers have a lot of information for each stack frame and thread. For those debuggers, then, trying to put everything together in a tree made finding useful information about attributes of stackframes etc. undesirable. Thus, the division into separate views. There was some effort towards dealing with the multi-thread and multi-process problem in other ways at that time. I do not know their state at this time.
Verified ... and Closing all issues resolved into NetBeans 6.7 and earlier.