There's a very cool thread here about another web server that runs on the tablets. Which reminds me of something else:

Nokia has this Mobile Web Server Project (aka Raccoon) which is basically Apache running on S60 phones and a way of making the phones accessible from the web through black magic (even though it probably doesn't have a public IP, traffic is routed through unpredictable channels at the carriers etc.).

Would there be a way of using the part of Raccoon that handles the public access to the device for a web server running on the tablet instead of on a phone?

mymobilesite.net is the end-user oriented beta of a service based on Raccoon. It's really cool: You can let users chat with you, let them access your camera (by either asking you to take a snapshot or simply taking it if you grant them access) and a few more things; developers talk about including a GPS-based localisation feature in the future.... All of this is accessible via username.mymobilesite.net.

I'd love to have exactly this for my tablet. Running a web server is one thing (and the one I mentioned before seems to be great), but you'd still need to have a public IP, dynDNS, a domain or something to make it public. - With the technology used in Raccoon it seems all I need is a user account on mymobilesite.net (or some other site running this software) and I'm done.

How cool would it be to have a website for your N810 that gives information on where you currently are, what you see around you etc. to selected, identified users? Any ideas on how to re-use Raccoon or similar stuff to achieve just this? Anyone from Nokia reading this and make the guys responsible for mymobilesite.net try to support the tablets, too? (Hey, it's an internet tablet after all! )

Overwhelmed by the enthusiastic response here I couldn't help but taking the issue straight to Nokia. Guess what? They say there are plans to work on a version of the Mobile Web Server for the N810. Not bad... (Actually I'm surprised they gave any information at all, even though "there are plans" is still a bit vague. My company would deny any such plan even if the product was ready and about to be released tomorrow)

Having Python available on the tablets already enables you to run a variety of interesting Web servers and services, more easily and probably faster than mono/xsp or Apache stuff.

These days I'm dabbling with web2py for a mobile app I want to carry around on my N800, it works quite well : http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu/

There are Apache, thttpd and nginx available for N8x0 already.

I guess using python you can access the information that interests you (or your users) then provide them with a convenient interface.

The whole point is not to have some web server.

The great thing about the MWS is that
a) there's meaningful, device-related content right from the start, you don't need to know anything about web-pages and server-configuration. Just install and it's all ready.
b) your server is always accessible from yourname.mymobilesite.net, no matter how you're connected. So: no additional messing with DynDNS or thelike, probably no problems with NAT either if it even works for phones now (and carriers do use strange things routing-wise to get phones online).

So: Yes , I could re-install the web server I had tried before on my tablet. But I wouldn't know how to stay accessible under one well-known URL when constantly changing from public WLAN to BT tethering to private WLAN during the day. And I wouldn't be willing to learn enough to enable user-management, some reasonable security measures and write applications that access camera, contacts, images-folder, GPS-data etc.

I'm very impressed by the way Nokia did all this for me on my S60 phone. Install, start, done. The magic is the "all in one" experience, not the fact that there's something listening on :80

Actually I already have location from the microserver in my minigpsd program (in the General forum). When proxied (due to GoogleMaps API key limitations) it works from remote devices (with my router set to forward the connection and use dyndns). There are many embedded servers available - some kind of micro httpd and "boa" are two I used, the latter on my Sharp Zaurus.

Security is a problem, also bandwidth and getting through NAT if you are using hotspots instead of your own router.