How to connect iPhone Safari to Windows HTTP server?

I'm completely new to the iPhone, so this is a newbie question.

The开发者_运维知识库 web development environment I use at work is set up on Windows 7, running Tomcat as a web server. Web Apps are tested by pointing a browser to "localhost".

I've been asked to port a web front end to the iPhone. Since I need to use this same development environment I need to connect the iPhone to the PC via USB or Ethernet.

There is this answer: "http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3132105/how-do-you-access-a-website-running-on-localhost-from-iphone-browser"

but I was hoping to do it without wireless.

Other questions I've researched are about iPhone development, the SDK, etc. I'm not developing iPhone code, only trying to get the iPhone Safari browser to access the IP address of the local PC, 192.168.xx.xx or whatever.

Seems like it should be simple, a matter of cabling?

it would be an issue of cabling... if the iPhone had an eternet jack :) But the wifi connection is the only "network jack" the phone has that you can connect to your own network directly with, the 3G or CDMA port gets routed via your mobile phone company, nothing you can do about that. Hence the need for WiFi to access non-routable addresses, like ...

Another option would be to make your server internet-routable, like middapark said. Then you can access it via your mobile phone provider's network and the public internet and can do away with the need to use Wifi.

A third option is to create a VPN tunnel from your iPhone to your local network, again via your mobile phone provider's network and the public internet. But I have no expereince with doing that, so I can not give further advice there.

The problem is most likely because you're trying to get your iPhone to view an internal (i.e.: not internet viewable) network. (Address such as 192.168.0.0, 172.16.0.0 and 10.0.0.0 and are non-routable as far as the internet as a whole is concerned.)

As such, unless you can access your internal network via wifi (or you're prepared to expose the machine in question to the internet, in which case you'll need to use a different IP address) this isn't possible.