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The Joys Of Porting
Gambit Thirty-Two writes "Old news, but Sendmail has ported their MTA to Linux390." And in other news: sitz writes "It would appear as though some madman has port apache to WinCE <Insert witty beowulf comment here>. It's only been tested on a couple of platforms (including the Jornada 720, and is 'based on the WinNT port, with lots of dirty modifications'. That's still pretty swanky. I've also set up a mirror of this site, which will be up for a couple of weeks." Update: 08/27 15:19 PM GMT by H : Yes, the Sendmail story is a dupe - somebody didn't read my story before posting his. *grin*
The WinCE apache thing, but then it hit me.
It isn't about the general type of web server that we know and love. It's about a portable transaction platform!
Imagine that you are a salesman, contractor or other individual who travels and does business with many different people in many different places. If you had a 802.11 (I don't think bluetooth will make it) enabled Jornada or iPaq, then you could cary a web-based transaction server with you, wherever you go. You wouldn't need a fixed IP, nor a constant broadband link to the internet.
You could hop on to your client's wireless LAN, or establish a peer-to-peer link to make your transaction server (e-business whatever) appear local to your clients. They could do business with you, and you take your web-site and data with you when you leave. In this way, you could use a near universal interface (web browser) to handle customer interactions, without having to scrawl all of the information in by a flaky pen-based interface.
This would be a very cheap way of doing business, with less threat of being cracked by some script kiddie.
-- Len
I've been running apache on my Cassiopeia for almost two years, i didn't know it was such a big deal! It was a nice way to step into connectivity on CE (apache having such decent docs and so many hackers at bay, it's a pleasure to port it) and also allows me to use my palm browser to browse pages dynamically. Useless? Naw. I can get an XML file from the Bentley manual to my Volkswagen and feed the information for a repair into pocket apache, then serve the info inside the file (including some SVG gfx) at a decent enough speed into my broswer. In a ten to fifteen page repair, i'd otherwise have to print everything out, thus wasting paper and creating a solution that won't last one oil change. Now, I just zip the palm pc in a freezer bag and BAM! Pocket Mechanic.
And for those of you naysayers out there, no, there isn't a paper manual for my engine, just the (poorly) encrypted XML version on CD.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
My initial reaction to the various servers ported to PDAs was "Why???". But the more I think about it, the more potential I see for it.
The biggest gain would be the elimination of proprietary synchronozation software/protocols. Right now, if I want to access my address book from a PC, I have to hookup the cradle (which requires a free serial or USB port, assuming your machine has functional USB support) install the sync software/drivers (assuming you're running the right OS) and then synchronize (which copies everything to the PC, which might not be a good idea if you're sync'ing to a machine at work).
Instead, say my PDA was running a mini-LDAP server that was acting as a front-end to my address book. Outlook, Outlook Express and Netscape Messenger all support LDAP, so any of them would have immediate access to my address book.
Of course, this all assumes your PDA is capable of Ethernet or 802.11.
An FTP server running on a PDA would be perfect for moving files. A web server would be able to serve up your notes, todo list, etc as HTML, complete with editting forms.
One snag I see is that you might not be able to run multiple servers on a PDA at once. In that case, you would need a universal protocol to piggyback everything on top of, such as SOAP running on a web server, then you would just need some SOAP based APIs, and software that could understand them. Hmmmm.