Prompt's TechBlog
Mobile Phone Web Server
24 January 2006
Posted by LC
Looks like those Finns have been at the vodka again - as if the idea of using a mobile phone as a web server wasn't far out enough for them, they also decided the best way to achieve this would be to port Apache to the Symbian OS which is used by many smart-phones. Apache (an open source web server used by millions) is of course a great piece of software, but you normally expect to find it running on a decent sized computer with lots of processing power, storage and bandwidth - the polar oppisite, in fact, of a mobile phone. Still, to their credit the guys at Nokia Research Center pulled it off and even managed to include mod_python so the device can run Python scripts.
Easy to laugh at this - but when you think about how fast the bandwidth and processing horsepower available to mobile devices is increasing, the idea starts to look intruiging. Imagine a world where everybody carries around their own web server, it raises some interesting prospects.
Easy to laugh at this - but when you think about how fast the bandwidth and processing horsepower available to mobile devices is increasing, the idea starts to look intruiging. Imagine a world where everybody carries around their own web server, it raises some interesting prospects.
# posted by LC at 6:21 PM 
Comments:
For creating simple personal websites, this could be an ideal technology. Most personal sites don't get masses of visits anyway, so they don't need a robust commercial hosting arrangement. It's still a bit of a faff to put photos or recordings online. The ability to have photos or videos made using the phone go live online immediately could transform how some people use the web, in the same way that blogging did. Although that ought to be possible wherever the server is by integrating FTP software into the phone.
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