Alexandre Rafalovitch, a BEA Backline Support Engineer emailed me about reading thread dumps and his proposal for formatting dump data. I've read through Alexandres article, and while I'm not a big fan of using XML for everything, he definitely presents an excellent view on making thread dumps easier to read and diagnose. The really cool part is that Alexandre has written an application which takes standard thread dump data, converts it into XML, then uses XSLT to convert the data into the format of your choice.
I'm actually a bit surprised that there isn't a JSR in progress to address this issue. I think one of the reasons for this is that most developers and users are not interested in the nuances of thread dump readability. Of course, as backline engineers, this topic is near and dear to myself and Alexandre. Alexandre will be presenting this in a session at JavaONE 2004, session TS-1646. I'll be sure to attend.
"What would be a perfect solution here is to be able to convert these thread-dumps into some sort of intermediate structure/language that has flexible structure, can tolerate missing fields, and can be processed by third-party tools in various ways. And, of course, if it can somehow involve a currently popular technology, so much the better.
Do we have such an intermediate language? Indeed we do ó it is XML. It is somewhat human readable, has many tools written for it, and already has not one but several transformation and reporting technologies built on top of it, such as XSLT, XQuery, and XDB." [full article]
11:00:40 PM 
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