A feature to discuss

A long time ago, as a lark, I implemented a feature in Spindle that
improved the developer experience when debugging/running their
Tapestry apps during development.

It was possible to link the Exception page back into the IDE. In other
words the Exception page rendered with links back into Eclipse.

I only got as far as turning the stack trace entries into links. When
you clicked on an entry in the stack trace, Eclipse would come to the
front and open an editor on the file in question, highlighting the
line in question. It was *really* cool.

I was running a mini servlet container inside Eclipse and the
generated links passed enough information back to open the right file.

I never deployed it as it involved pretty ugly hacking in Tapestry 3.

I understand that the Exception page is more configurable in T4 and
hacks would not be required (I haven't tried it yet though).

Would like to revisit this feature and solicit discussion. I know it
seems strange to talk about GUI features when the core isn't working
yet. I thought throwing this topic out now would be nice change from
the long winded blathering of late.

What are the issues you see in such a feature?

I can think of a couple off hand:

- how to ensure that someone does hijack your IDE window!
- how to implement this in an IDE agnostic way so tools like tapidea
can also benefit?
- what would be the mechanism by which this feature is enabled during
development but not there at all in production?

Has anyone already taken advantage of the new "configurability" of the
Exception page? What was the experience like?

Geoff

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