May I know the differences between application servers and web servers? Please list examples of each.
A:
A web server can sometimes act as an application server (for example, when it hosts web services). However, an application server does not have to be implemented as a web server. It can just listen on tcp sockets and act accordingly
Joel Martinez
2010-01-02 20:12:05
+2
A:
web server is a container for simple operations like servlet/jsp container. application server is a container like web server but add more operations than web server like transactions manager, data source, clustering, load balance, messaging ,and others complicated business operations .
web server like apatche tomcat.
application server like jboss, glassfish, web sphere, oracle application server.
bassem
2010-01-02 20:14:34
I disagree. A Web Server is just a specific form of Application Server.
skaffman
2010-01-02 20:48:24
aim agree that web server is a special edition from application server. web server is lightweight containerand application server is heavyweight container cause contains many services and containers like jsp/servler and ejb container and other services .
bassem
2010-01-02 20:57:35
@bassem: That doesn't really make a lot of sense.. Firstly, a webserver is not a 'lightweight container'. Some webservers are more lightweight than others. lighttpd is a minimal, small-footprint, fast webserver, for example. Apache could not be called lightweight.Secondly - the term is 'Application Server' is very generic. It means different things depending on who you ask.
2010-01-02 21:47:41
+2
A:
A 'web server' is generally any server program which serves content using the http (or https) protocols. These servers tend to listen on specific ports (80, or 443). The clients for these are generally web browsers like Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer.
Examples of web servers: Apache, Microsoft IIS
'Application server' is a far more fuzzy, less well defined term. It could refer to any program providing responses to client requests for a given application.
In the context of webserving, an 'application server' tends to refer to a higher level framework used to generate dynamic content. This could be some kind of container, within which you can deploy a particular 'web application'. Examples would include Apache Tomcat, WebSphere, JBoss etc.
In both cases, the term could also refer to the machine hardware which hosts software to do these things.