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.
It should be possible to create a module apisupport/agent (to be included in harness cluster, perhaps? or platform?) which would register some JMX MBeans that would serve up important runtime diagnostic info such as - contents of SFS (incl. available instances, DataObject info, etc.) - global lookup - AWT focus information (see issue #31449) - preferences - module list - maybe more... Quite simple to do in JDK 6, using MXBeans. Trickier but still possible in JDK 5: could use Model MBeans (but I can't get them to work at all); or Dynamic MBeans (cumbersome); or Open MBeans (reasonably powerful but a pain to set up). Also in JDK 5 you apparently need to pass -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote to the VM in order for management to work at all. Ideally, information would be browsable in a crude form using just jconsole, if you really needed to (e.g. for emergency field diagnosis), but with a richer client available as part of a separate apisupport IDE module, e.g. displayed in the Runtime tab. Could serve as a complete replacement for the "bean browser" functionality in apisupport, but usable even in platform apps.
Maybe you already know this - but here is a nice tool http://mc4j.sf.net - it is based on NetBeans and contains generic access to JMX - try it out it may be a starting point at least
Re. MC4J - interesting. Not directly usable but I will look to see if there are some tricks I can use from it. Thanks for tip (I had heard about it long ago but forgotten).
Sound like an interesting project. Since I am developing a rich client application based on NetBeans RCP I am interested in anything you dig up. Maybe I can even help out with something?
Re. last comment: perhaps. It's up to me to get things rolling and create the basic framework and some inspection hooks. Don't have time to work on it immediately but I hope sometime this year. Then it should be relatively easy for people to add additional mbeans (or whatever) according to their needs and corresponding GUI visualizers from the IDE.