It is the iPhone, the singular creation upon which Apple’s Mobile Wi-Fi platform is predicated. While its primary construct, and ergo heretofore deliberate focus, has been the express realization of an unparalleled client-side experience, it remains at its core irrevocably a UNIX-based operating system and hence capable of infinitely more.

While the sublime profundity of said client-side, and thus end-user, experience continues to approach perfection, anomalous entities — self-designated 133t hax0rs — have also succeeded in bending, perhaps even breaking, the iPhone’s default parameters with a secondary, decidedly more server-oriented goal, vis-a-vis the porting of Apache, Python, vim, curl, and more apropos this posting: lighttpd.

Witness, as excerpted from the Unofficial Apple Weblog, the initial causality of such an implementation:

Mark Hoekstra of GEEKtechnique offers real-world proof that an iPhone can, indeed, function as a web server. He put up a static page and served 411 unique visitors during the time his server was offline for maintenance. Obviously, that’s not battle-testing for a busier server, and the lack of database queries certainly aided the capacity of the tiny server, but it’s definitely a fun example of the capabilities of a (hacked) iPhone.

Indeed.

Endemic to certain entities within the system are the simultaneous and yet conflicting desires for increased power in ever smaller footprints, previously demonstrated in the phenomena known as “Mac Mini Server Farms”.

Will any such ridiculously intriguing architectures reliant solely upon the inimitable iPhone follow?

Inevitably.