So, all of the above problems appear to be related to some sort of corruption that resulted in the default.py controller. I noticed that in the traceback it would be shown with 2 additional lines that I did not enter. I did not see these in any external editor. I had previously backed up the application in the file system so I could delete it and restore it if needed.
I tried to delete the app and it wouldn't delete (likely because I hadn't stopped apache and python/web2py were still running--an explicit "stop" would be useful). But, web2py would hang. I rebooted my system. When I returned, the app was still there, but without any controllers. Interesting. I copied the controllers back and lo, and behold, it all worked. It has worked since but I shall be wary of the internal editor though it is convenient for small changes and debugging. The issue with documentation is that it just a bit scattered. Some of the very most helpful bits appear to have some sort of configuration issue. The examples and the api help available via the admin interface are useful and cover areas not in the web2py book. When I attempt to access these while running on mod_wsgi and apache I get error 503 (service not available or no capacity). When I run on rocket server they are accessible. Any thoughts? Is anything internally coded to port 8000? It would be nice not to have to go in and out of apache to use this doc. Generally, I have had a lot of config challenges not covered in the config recipes. Apache web based documentation was essential to clearing these up. Some of the forms methods are a bit confusing and the examples (when I run on rocket) showed a way out. While the framework does a lot of work that I don't have to do, masking sql and introducing some new syntax/semantics on html creates some confusion for me.
