Paint me a pretty... uhm... error?

Obviously I've been following TurboGears (duh... it's a blog). I wouldn't call it "closely". Mostly, I've been lurking in the IRC channel and skimming the newsgroup traffic. The additions of an identity/security module and the CatWalk model browser are obviously big steps towards a viable web platform. There had actually been some changes and updates (nothing major) to the base systems as well, so I decided to run through the 20 minute Wiki tutorial again (coding it, not just watching it).

I can type rather quickly, but nobody's perfect. Thanks to my typos, I generated some rather interesting errors that made TurboGears misbehave. I mean... like... really misbehave. Sure I had my share of misspelled variable names. I kept hitting refresh only to find that I didn't have an object called "pate". A quick glance in my controller allowed me to change it to "page" and get back on track. Luckily, I'm familiar enough with Python to decode all of the gibberish it spits out and get straight to the error for logic problems that display in the page. However, I feel for the unwashed who see what the errors produce and have no idea where to even start looking. I think this can probably be handled better (and possibly even provide a little automated hand-holding).

Before I continue, there is one particular situation I need to directly address. One particular typo was a complete showstopper. By "complete showstopper" I mean it stopped the entire TurboGears daemon dead in its tracks. Trying to load http://localhost:8080/ threw up a "Connection refused" message. Naturally, I looked in the console where I was running TG and found the error. As it turns out, TG had attempted to reload my model.py and barfed on a typo. I had tried to call the comple (typo for compile) method on my wikiwords re object. Whoops! Again, this was easily fixed, but I pity the remote developer who may not have access to such information.

So how can these be improved? Some obvious suggestions come to mind. One particular thought is to have the error handling page load the Simple Description, TraceBack, and any other pertinent information in JSON format. Perhaps display the true error in a simple format (e.g. "No such method comple in model.py on line 123") and have a "Click here for traceback" link that would display the full traceback information.

As far as the model.py error completely stopping TG, I think that would (obviously) be relegated to error handling code elsewhere in the MVC chain.