Port 8080 is an alternative to the port 80 used by http and web services.

History:

The Internet was largely born on UNIX-based systems and servers. UNIX enforces the notion of the first 1023 "privileged ports" which can only be opened by services running with so-called "root", or administrative, privileges. Historically, this meant that only authorized system administrators were able to establish and operate a web server on port 80 since this was within the first 1023-port privileged region. Therefore, when non-administrators wished to run their own web servers on machines which might already have a server running on port 80, or when they were not authorized to run services below port 1024, port 8080 was often chosen as a convenient place to host a secondary or alternate web server.