You can run FeatureServer under IIS, Apache, or using it's own WSGI based http server. This page outlines how to get it up and running quickly on Windows using the http server and FWTools for supporting OGR dataformats.
1) Download FeatureServer (the full zip) from http://featureserver.org. This zipfile should include simplejson, paste, and wsgiref subfolders, amongst others. Unzip this to somewhere (eg c:\temp\featureserver)
2) Go to where you unzipped featureserver, and modify featureserver.cfg so that the scribble layer points to a valid filename in a folder you have write access to (eg c:/temp/featureserver.scribble). Do not use a single backslash (eg c:\temp) -- use a single forward slash instead in this portion of the file.
3) Actually, you are done now. Assuming you already have python v2.3 or above installed, you can just run the featureserver_http_server.py However, assuming you want to use OGR datasources (eg shapefiles, or your SDE instance, etc), then you should install another program that packages python with OGR and other good open source stuff for you to play with:
4) Download and install FWTools from http://fwtools.maptools.org.
5) Open a command prompt (start->run->cmd) and set your fwtools environment variable (run, for example, "C:\Program Files\FWTools2.0.0\setfw.bat").
6) Now have fwtools' python run the basic webserver, eg:
C:\Program Files\FWTools2.0.0\python\python.exe c:\temp\featureserver\featureserver_http_server.py
It should say it's now listening on port 8080 (you can choose your port with the -p switch. Choose port 80 if you don't have another webserver running on that already, and then you can leave the port out of the url you go to)..
7) Go check it out in a browser: http://localhost:8080 (or just http://localhost if you are running it on port 80)
You should see the list of layers (probably just the scribble layer). add /scribble to your url to get to it (probably nothing in there). Read the DataSource.txt in the doc folder and add a new OGR layer (eg shapefile) as they describe. For example:
[cities] type=OGR dsn=c:/temp/top_cities.shp layer=top_cities
Now, send your friends to http://your_computer_name_or_ip/cities?format=kml&maxfeatures=40 where cities is the name of the featureserver layer you put in the brackets in featureserver.cfg
Read the other stuff in the doc folder to see what kind of formats and queries are supported
