Since on an iPad we cannot edit the hosts file (without jailbreaking), how can we arbitrarily redirect web traffic to another url?
This would be important for someth
I found you just have to modify the Wifi settings in your iPad to use the IP address of your development machine as an HTTP proxy (as explained in the aforementioned article):

That way, it's enough to be able to access your web application on your iPad by entering the url of the virtual host (e.g. local.mywebapp.com). It's easy and quick, but unlike Will Koehler's solution, you will however not be able to access Internet from the iPad. But most of the time it's not really a problem, since you just want to test your own application.