Sahana Instance Running on a Mobile Phone Server
Goal here is to get web2py and Sahana3 to run on a mobile phone which can use its WLAN card as a Wifi 802.11b/g access point for volunteers to connect to via their wifi-enabled laptops or wifi-enabled mobile phones for instant access to a local Sahana instance.
I have been into this for the [OpenMoko|http://www.openmoko.com] however its wifi card does not support Master mode to act as a hotspot. It does support Ad-Hoc but this does not play nice with any of the major OS's. I wrote a short review about the experiment: http://blog.nemik.net/2009/01/04/openmoko-and-wifi-ad-hoc-mode/
Next option would be Android. However it is not really very open to things like changing Wifi modes and no one has yet had it working as an access point either.
Currently, the best option seems to be Nokia Series 60 3rd Edition phones which support Nokia's MWS (Mobile Web Server, http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/mobile-web-server/) and [PAMP|http://wiki.opensource.nokia.com/projects/PAMP] (Personal Apache MySQL PHP/Python) setup. This seems like an excellent choice because the Nokia phones are apparently capable of putting their Wifi cards into properly working Ad-Hoc and Infrastructure/Master modes for other devices to connect to them. My only complaint about this is Nokia's choice to use MySQL which is a rather heavy and memory-intensive database for what should be a light app. In my opinion, something like SQLite would be a lot better suited for this purpose. I will try to see if there are any SQLite implementations in existence for the Nokia Series 60 platform. This would help to make the app faster and able to accommodate more simultaneous users.
The best thing about such a system would be its portability, low power usage, easy to deploy and running on very common hardware (Nokia S60 being the best-selling and most available smartphone platform). On top of that, internet access over a 3G/GPRS connection from the phone and managing of incoming and sending SMS's would be available for free with such hardware. Without the need for adding complicated add-ons for such functionality such as phones/modems over serial ports and external daemons (such as smstools).
