i’ve just spent an age tracking down a problem parsing an xml file with commons digester. it turned out to be because someone had missed an element out of the hierarchy, and digester was trying to call a method which didn’t exist because of that

tracking down the problem took ages because there is no information in java stack traces other than a list of method calls. if each method called had an ability to annotate the current stack frame with some application related information [ the name or path of the xml element currently being processed in this case ], then i wouldn’t have needed to fire up the debugger and manually correlate the stack trace with objects in the debugger

all that would be needed would be some method like :

Thread.annotateStackTrace(String)