OpenMoko light web server

[Matthew S. Hamrick]

Yeah... there's been some discussion of this already on the SVHMPC list.

At first people rejected the idea as being "silly." I mean seriously,  
why would you ever want to put a web server on an embedded device,  
right?

Then we started thinking about the tools that are available to web  
developers and realized it wasn't _THAT_ silly of an idea.

I'm actually working on a simple XML/XHTML based interface onboard a  
GumStix based homebrew mobile. You can see an early experiment at  
http://hbmobile.org/jowles/ .

The jowles interface has html and javascript as the front end and a  
cgi script that receives XML Posts as requests to do things (like  
query status, dial the phone, etc.) The server spits back XML which  
the javascript parses and displays.

The idea here is that the myPhone ( http://www.hbmobile.org/wiki/ 
index.php?title=MyPhone ) is going to be a linux device, so while  
some people are off doing the hardware, we can start developing a  
simple interface on our Unix systems that are plugged into Telit  
modules ( http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php? 
products_id=280 ).

Why is this apropos to OpenMoko? Well... after doing the Vulcan mind  
meld with Sean over beers at eTel, it dawned on a lot of us myPhone  
guys that we're really all on the same side here... and many of us  
are interested in porting OpenMoko to our open myPhone hardware.

So... what we're looking at building in the next week or so is...

* a gumstix hooked to a telit module via a serial port
* a PC / Macintosh hooked to the gumstix via a USB cable

and then the software:

* Firefox on the PC talking to the boa server on the Gumstix
* boa handing off to our custom GGI-BIN that parses and produces XML  
to control (and query the state of) the telit module
* javascript and HTML that provides a UI to control the phone.

at some point I would love for this to develop into a wonderfully  
componentized system where application developers can drag and drop  
components into a container, hit the "deploy" button and miraculously  
the software on your phone is updated. But for now it's just a simple  
C app.

also... I would love to have this stuff work well with the OpenMoko  
components instead of just libgsmc. maybe in the future we'll define  
a component architecture so app developers could define an XML  
interface that jowles could use to control things other than just the  
dialer.

-Cheers!
-Matt H.

On Apr 16, 2007, at 9:35 AM, Richard Boehme wrote:

> It would be really nice if OpenMoko had a light web server so that we
> could write CGI scripts that would have an OpenMoko stylesheet applied
> to them. That way, we could make OpenMoko apps that we would be able
> to also deploy on normal web servers without having to maintain a
> "OpenMoko" GUI and a web interface.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Richard Boehme
>
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