Nokia S60 Apache (Raccoon) Open Sourced

A month and a half ago Nokia Research made available on an experimental basis Raccoon, a S60 Series web server based on Apache. The phone as a server has tremendous applications and implications for the phone as a fully equal peer on the Internet. Seeing first-hand the reaction to Chris Heathcote’s demonstration at reboot8 of Raccoon, drove home the point of how unexpected the move from client to server was, even to a rather tech-savvy crowd.

How does it work? In order to bypass the issue with dynamically assigned IP addresses on the cellular networks, Raccoon connects with a public gateway proxy (think dynamic DNS and some data compression). Using the ported mod_python and the previously released Python for S60, Raccoon comes with interfaces to a range of phone applications including camera, calendar, contacts, audio recording and playback, and SMS in-/outbox.
The Raccoon team have also included a couple of concept demos with the download, notably

  • Remote interactive picture taking. (Phone owner is prompted before picture is taken)
  • Use the phone as a webcam. (As above)
  • Find other mobile web sites in the proximity. (Discovery of other Raccoon-enabled devices in range using bluetooth)
  • Find out the location of a mobile website. (The cell-id of the phone)

Before anyone digested the initial release, Nokia then three weeks later announced that Raccoon is now open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Essentially the open sourcing of Raccoon introduces only two novel direct implications, namely that one can create native Apache modules and set up a gateway of one’s own.

This post has been sitting unpublished since Nokia’s announcement, awaiting confirmation and scheduling of the Raccoon team for EuroOSCON in September. Now they are so go have fun with Raccoon, rip your GPRS juice, and bring us your wares for EuroOSCON!

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