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This post has been sitting unpublished since Nokia's announcement, awaiting confirmation and scheduling of the Raccoon team for EuroOSCON in September.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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Comments: 8
[06.18.06 08:54 PM]
Hummm... So what happens when you're running your personal server from your phone and your dog mistakenly drops the phone in the toilet? Is all your "content" gone also?
Not to mention when you turn it off for the four hour flight from LAX to NYC? Does the web connection just drop when you have to turn it off?
While I think that the idea is interesting (and there are certainly other ideas along this line which would be practical) I feel that a phone is just to unreliable for serving web pages.
Nick
[06.19.06 02:56 AM]
Nick, the real content is you carrying the phone, your contacts, sms'es, etc. I'm sure you'd be sorry to lose that web server or not.
Think the web server more as an aditional, richer interaction with the user -- a personal webserver --, and not as a server of your latest hottest mass market web app. Find out precense information, take pictures together, etc. Being offline might actually mean something in itself.
/n
[06.19.06 03:52 PM]
When do we get a mdns-sd implementation? Thats when this is actually useful; when you can walk around with your web page in your pocket, free for others in the local area to browse.
There's no incentive to run a real webserver off a phone. There is incentive to make your web presence imminently available.
I still would have preffered lighttpd. ;)
[06.19.06 04:22 PM]
Rektide, I'm not quite sure why the DNS-SD reference, but I agree with your point.
Do note that Raccoon is available through bluetooth thus enabling much of what you're asking for (unless I misunderstand you). There is even a Raccoon concept demo aptly named "Find other mobile web sites in the proximity."
/n
[06.19.06 11:26 PM]
Thanks for the reply Nikolaj. I still dont buy that Nokia Research is grasping where Raccoon is genuinely needed, as I still dont believe meant to facilitate adhoc connection.
"Our target was to make it possible to access a webserver running on a mobile phone, equipped with a standard operator SIM, from any browser on the Internet, at any time.
Initially we utilized a Bluetooth PAN network but although that already is useful - it provides for the possibility of accessing functionality on the phone using a big screen and proper keyboard - it is quite limited compared with what access over the cellular network would imply."
I may well be horribly wrong about this, but my conception of Bluetooth has always been as a master slave peripherial network. You can discover services, sure, but there is only one master. I dont know how you'd go about creating a more conventional interconnection network out of bluetooth devices to allow even a modest four or five people to all easily discover and browse your web page at once. I suppose though that 802.11 is still quite rare on phones, so you've got to work with whatever is available. Please forgive me if I'm terribly wrong about Bluetooth!!
Positing this, the real connectivity Raccoon seems to be pumping is "mobile internet". But honestly, an internet-based web-serving cellphone is a pretty god awful atrocious idea, fraught with bandwidth latency & connectivity issues galore. The reason you'd carry a phone server with you is so you can a) push data to a real server and b) have a point of presence for people in the immediate area; for creating adhoc connections & networks. Again, the word here is imminent, to make your data immediately and sharply relevant through the bonds of real world connection.
For anyone using a computer, mdns+dns-sd is about as simple as ad-hoc service discovery can get, thats why I mentioned it. In College we'd sit around lecture bouncing around between the various web chat and music servers everyone had hosted on their laptops. We had bigger better campus servers for everything, sure, but between hordes of babbling freshmen CS majors and the general facelessness of it all, it was far more enjoyable (aka: actually worth using) when it was a bunch of people enduring the same lecture, sitting across the room from one another. It feels a lot less like really bad efnet IRC, and more like a meeting of minds or community.
-rektide
[05.21.07 03:01 PM]
What about Web Services??? Does the S60 Mobile Web Server support any web services? This would be great. To create a Web Service and to put it into the Mobile Server, then any other device can use that service accesing it from a phone, from another i.e mobile device :)
[05.21.07 03:02 PM]
What about Web Services??? Does the S60 Mobile Web Server support any web services? This would be great. To create a Web Service and to put it into the Mobile Server, then any other device can use that service accessing it from a phone, from another i.e mobile device :)
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Alex Payne [06.16.06 03:22 PM]
Sounds great. If only Nokia could bring affordable, appealing S60 phones to the US market.