I was browsing the Android Market (App Store for you iPhone junkies) and I saw an application that was rather cool. Someone has put together a web server that runs off the Android platform. Granted, it’s limited to one connection at a time, and it’s by-default password protected, but it demonstrates a cool concept. They bundle it with a photo-sharing app which I have yet to try out.

This all got me thinking: I wonder if I can run MediaWiki on the system? I know by default that applications for Android are in Java, but would it be possible to compile PHP on the device and get MediaWiki up and running? Even just to run update.php would be awesome to me. Might be hard, as the RC30 release made it more difficult to obtain root on your system. The default user (if you have the terminal client) is so restricted its not even funny. No hopes of compiling there. However, the second issue is getting some web server up and running. I highly doubt I’d be able to get Apache going, but its certainly something to think about. Since applications are supposed to be in Java (although, I’ve heard some rumors of the .NET platform being partially ported to Android), I thought it might be easier to port something like TTiny JWS to Android, which should be significantly easier than attempting to run Apache–or worse, writing my own Java-based web server.

Maybe this can become my pet project on the weekends :) . I can always try a local VM and see where that gets me, before I potentially brick my phone trying to hack MediaWiki into running. Still, this all depends on me being able to compile PHP on Android to begin with…