Web server on the phone?

[Hans L]

I think the idea of designing interfaces with existing web
technologies is not such a bad idea. But I would not automatically
make the assumption that a web server must be involved to do so.  You
might be interested in trying to develop in a XUL interface(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL ), which is supposed to leverage
javascript, css and DOM which you are probably familiar with.
Honestly, I know very little about XUL, except that it sounds like it
might be a convenient way for web developers to move towards GUI
programming.  Also, I'm not sure if this is currently buildable to run
on openmoko, but it's something to look into.

Hans


On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 2:35 AM, Dirk Bergstrom <openmoko at otisbean.com> 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.
>
> I see that there's a busybox server:
>
> http://buildhost.openmoko.org/daily-feed/armv4t/busybox-httpd_1.11.0-r2_armv4t.ipk
>
> One might also consider thttpd:
>
> http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/
>
> Or shttpd:
>
> http://shttpd.sourceforge.net/
>
> I suspect any of them would be OK for serving static files.  However, I
> wonder if CGI would be feasible.  I'm guessing that spawning a shell
> script wouldn't be too hard, but I suspect that spinning up a whole
> python process might be a bit much for the little arm CPU.  Anyone have
> any thoughts on that?
>
> Since I'm quite familiar with Django (http://www.djangoproject.com), I
> thought I might just run the Django development server, which has a
> toy-ish httpd server built in.  That way I'd already have python
> running, so I'd avoid all the fork/exec/load-libraries overhead.
>
> Not really sure where I'm going with this, just throwing out ideas to
> see if anyone says yea or nay.
>
> --
> Dirk
>
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