On one machine having SuSE 10.2 OS, I am running Jboss app server 4.2. By default it runs http server on port 8080. I was able to access it from browser using http://127.0.0.1:8080 URL. But I was not able to access it using LAN IP (192.168.1.2 in this case) from same machine or from any other machines over LAN. I checked SuSE firewall, opened port 8080 for internal zone, also allowed http service, but still I had no luck.
Then after spending lot more time and tricks, I came across this.
netstat -ant | grep 8080
showed port 8080 bound to 127.0.0.1 interface. It did not show 8080 bound to 192.168.1.2. That was the problem. To access http server using LAN IP I had to bound it to port 8080. In case of Jboss this is done by providing flag -b to run.sh script.
./run.sh -b 192.168.1.2
This solved the problem. Note that you still have to open http port for internal zone in case you are not running http service on default port 80.