Category: Mobile Web Server

This page was last modified 08:42, 16 May 2008.

From Forum Nokia Wiki

This is a collection of Frequently Asked Questions about Mobile Web Server with answers. Feel free to add your own questions or fill in answers.

Q: What does the Mobile Web Server do?

Mobile Web Server makes your device accessible in the Internet with a browser. You get to name your device and give it a unique Internet presence. This is not synchronisation or duplicating the content, this is a real web server (based on Apache HTTP server) running on the device.

Q: So what are the benefits of running this server on the phone?

• Browse and edit your phone contents such as contacts, calendar, phone log
• Read and send SMS messages
• Receive instant messages or chat with visitors accessing your device
• Host a guestbook or a blog, in your phone
• Use it for yourself, or start sharing any of your device data with your friends, family - or to the whole world
• You are the "administrator" of the web site, you control who gets to see which data
• No need to rely on external services, it's all right there in your pocket
• And because this is a fully expandable platform for application development as well, you can expect totally new features in the future

Getting started

Q: How do I get started?

Go to http://mymobilesite.net and register yourself a mymobilesite.net domain name. Install the S60 application into your phone and follow the instructions given by the application to get started. Once your done you have a web site hosted on your phone and you can access via any browser anywhere in the world with URL http://yourdomain.mymobilesite.net.

Q: This can't be secure?

Yes it can and it is. The traffic is always secured in transport layer by SSL and your content in the phone is not shared to anyone other than yourself unless you want to.

Q: This will surely drain my battery really fast?

In short no it doesn't, however the more traffic you have on your phone the more it will consume battery just like browsing the web etc. does. When the server is just in standby mode the additional battery drain caused is very small. There is also an option to automatically shut down the server when your battery is in 30% or 15% level.

Q: Will this generate me a huge phone bill?

That depends on your data plan. You will pay for all traffic handled by the server so a flat-fee data plan or just using WLAN is a good choice. There is a traffic meter shown on the application UI and you set a pre-defined limit for data traffic so you won't get any unpleasant surprises.

Tuning my mobile site

Q: So I have my site running but how do I make it look more personal?

You can add new themes, and modify or remove existing ones. The mobile site themes are CSS files located in the Web browser/htdocs/Framework/themes folder in your mobile device memory. For more information about working with the themes, see the example CSS file commented_default.css. You can also check out this user-generated theme to get an idea how different it can look just by modifying the CSS file: [1]

Q: Can I replace the default applications with my own?

Sure you can. You can either start to host your static HTML site, or add some Python Server Pages to create dynamic sites. Here is the document to get you started: [2]

Q: I am an experienced developer, where do I find all the technical stuff?

Start from http://www.forum.nokia.com/mws and also download the book: http://mymobilesite.net/documentation/

Q: The default themes are not optimized for mobile browsing?

True. We have a mobile theme in development, you can get it here: http://mosh.nokia.com/content/4D4CCFA91E1F2978E040050A45302180. It will integrated into MWS later.

Q: My question here?

My answer here.