I realize that this may spur a religious discussion, but I discussed this with friends and get great, but conflicting answers and the actual documentation is of little help.

What does the 500 series response codes mean from the webserver? Internal Server Error, but that is vague. My assumption is that it means that something bad happened to the server (file system corruption, no connection to the database, network issue, etc.) but not specifically a data driven error (divide by zero, record missing, bad parameter, etc).

Something to note, there are some web client implementations (the default Android and Blackberry httpclients) that do not allow access to the html boddy if the server response is 500 so there is no way to determine what caused the issue from the client.

What I have been been implementing recently is a web service that returns a json payload wrapped in a response object that contains more specific error information if it is data related, but the server response will be 200 since it finished the actual processing.

Thoughts?