Web server on the phone?

[Alexey Feldgendler]

On Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:34:12 +0200, arne anka <openmoko at ginguppin.de>  
wrote:

>> Basically all of my experience writing UIs is on the web.  I'd like to
>> run a webserver on the phone, so I can write dirt-simple UIs that way,
>> rather than getting tied up in GTK/e/Qt.

> - any correctly designed webserver would hinder you from accessing the
> files of the underlying system, except your webapp
> - you would need o lot of code to connect to the underlying systems api,
> so you may access the system
> - there would be another layer consuming resources
> - you'd need to protect your phone/webserver from being connected to from
> the world (firewall or so) which probably will eat another share of
> resources
> - to access your app you will need a running browser(engine) which will
> eat resources too
> - every interaction will be from browser to server and back and you will
> probably need a resource hog like ajax to accomplish something resembling
> a native app

Using an actual local web server strikes me as an extremely wasteful  
set-up that can be an overkill even for a desktop application, let alone  
mobile. However, using a good web browser engine as a UI platform  
alternative to native toolkits has been successfully done before. In that  
approach, the browser engine is modified, extended, or built into the  
application. Instead of accessing a web server to execute actions, a  
custom ECMAScript API is used by the HTML-based UI. The custom API is  
implemented as native code and provides the actual functionality of the  
application.


-- 
Alexey Feldgendler <alexey at feldgendler.ru>
[ICQ: 115226275] http://feldgendler.livejournal.com