Ok, I'm gonna try to keep this one short because I only have about 15 minutes to write this. The long story short is that I got NodeJS compiled on my jailbroken iPhone 4! It was a long quest to get it working properly but I've done the hard work and compiled a .deb file compatible with Cydia for your installing pleasure...

First, Installation

So obviously you want to get it up and running first. I haven't done much testing as far as different devices, but I did install and uninstall this .deb from my girlfriend's iPhone as well and it worked well. I'll try and keep compiled NodeJS iOS .deb files on my node GitHub fork "downloads" page:

https://github.com/TooTallNate/node/downloads

The first thing I would do is SSH into your iPhone. Make sure you have the dpkg command installed, otherwise go back into Cydia and get it (I think it might be under APT7 though, or something like that).

So get the 'node-v0.4.5-ios-arm-1.deb' file from the link above (or a newer version if one exists), and get it onto your iDevice somehow (scp, wget, curl, etc.). Once it's downloaded onto your device, you should be able to run:

$ dpkg -i node-v0.4.5-ios-arm-1.deb

And that's it! After that try to mess around with node:

$ node
> require('os').cpus()
[ { model: 'N90AP',
    speed: 0,
    times:
     { user: 9209240,
       nice: 0,
       sys: 6997410,
       idle: 255377220,
       irq: 0 } } ]

The N90AP is the CPU my iPhone 4 is running, so hot damn, we're running node on an iPhone!

Now What?

The first thing I did was install npm. This was also my first try at the new npm 1.0 stuff. I really like it, but that's another story :P

No seriously, what the hell use is node on an iPhone (or other iDevice?). While I haven't found any awesome reasons yet, I do know that they will probably involve utilyzing the hardware of the device, i.e. the accelerometer, the digital compass, the touch events, etc.

So that's why I've starting node-iOS, working on getting bindings for the iOS APIs that are fun to use. The library is very minimal at the moment. I'm ashamed to say that only a vibrate() function is currently implemented (which is still somewhat fun to play with in it's own right), but more is definitely on it's way!

If you come up with any awesome uses for node on an iDevice, definitely let me know in the comments!