While primarily a web server, Jetty can also facilitate machine-to-machine communication. LiteSpeed is a web server with excellent performance and scalability properties. LiteSpeed offers a wide range of features and has an easy-to-use web admin console. Glassfish can also function as a web server. JBoss application server is an open-source platform for building, deploying, and hosting Java applications.
JBoss operates across platforms, and you can use it on any operating system that supports Java. Now that you understand the difference between web and application servers, it becomes easier to see which one is the better fit:. Another option is to use plugins to add functionalities to a web server.
A popular setup is to deploy both a web server and an application server in the same system. This setup makes sense for websites that provide both static and dynamic content. In that case, the web server becomes a subset of the application server, and both services run on the same hardware. The main reason for deploying both types of servers is improved system performance.
Each server focuses on its strong points, and you prevent simple web requests from impacting application server performance. As an example, consider an e-store that provides real-time pricing information.
Such sites typically have a form with which a user can purchase products. When the user submits a query, the website does a lookup and returns the results set within an HTML page. The application server stores the business logic for the pricing lookup. By placing the pricing logic in the app server, the logic becomes reusable between different parts of the application. In our first scenario, the pricing lookup service is not reusable as data is embedded in an HTML page.
The overlap between application and web servers means that each use case has several valid solutions. In Java terms, there's one more: web container or more strictly, servlet container. It's, say, in between web server and application server. An example is Apache Tomcat. An application server is typically designed and deployed to facilitate longer running processes that will also be more resource intensive.
A web server is used for short bursts that are not resource intensive, generally. This is mostly to facilitate serving up web based traffic. A web server runs the HTTP protocol to serve web pages. An application server is a machine an executable process running on some machine, actually that "listens" on any channel, using any protocol , for requests from clients for whatever service it provides, and then does something based on those requests. On the other hand, an application server is a container upon which you can build and expose business logic and processes to client applications through various protocols including HTTP in a n-tier architecture.
But none really survived the Java application server era. Biggest difference is a Web Server handles HTTP requests, while an Application server will execute business logic on any number of protocols. Actually Apache is a web server and Tomcat is an application server. When as HTTP request comes to web server. Then static contents send back to browser by web server.
Is there and logic do to done, then that request send to the application server. All of the above is just over-complicating something very simple. If you look at TomEE as an example:. You can get JPA and the other tech in the web server as well if you want, but the application servers just package all of these things for your convenience. To be fully classified as an app server you essentially need to comply with a list of tools set forth by some standard. There is not necessarily a clear dividing line.
Nowadays, many programs combine elements of both - serving http requests web server and handling business logic app server. A web server is a computer system that processes requests via HTTP, the basic network protocol used to distribute information on the World Wide Web.
The term can refer to the entire system, or specifically to the software that accepts and supervises the HTTP requests. An application server runs behind a web Server e. Web applications are computer code which run atop application servers and are written in the language s the application server supports and call the runtime libraries and components the application server offers.
Application server and web server both are used to host web application. Below servers can generate dynamic HTTP content. Application Server can do whatever Web Server is capable and listens using any protocol as well as App Server have components and features to support Application level services such as Connection Pooling, Object Pooling, Transaction Support, Messaging services etc.
Almost every page you visit uses both. The static content eg, images, videos is served by the web server, and the rest the parts that are different between you and other users are generated by the application server.
While there may be overlaps between the two some web servers may even be used as application servers the biggest difference IMHO is in the processing model and the session management:. In Web server processing model, the focus is on handling requests; the notion of "session" is pretty much virtual.
In Application server the session is usually more explicit and often takes form of an object living in memory of the application server for the entire duration of the "session". If you'd do that, then the information would be embedded inside requested the HTML content.
What would be the impact? For example, imagine you have 2 different apps which renders entirely different HTML content on the browser. If you would separate the business logic into an app-server than you could provide different web-servers looking up the same data in the app-server via scripts. However, If you wouldn't separate the logic and keep it in the web-server, whenever you change your business model, you would end up changing it in every single web-server you have which would take more time, be less reliable and error-prone.
IBM makes a really nice comparison between the two :. A web server delivers static web content—e. An application server typically can deliver web content too, but its primary job is to enable interaction between end-user clients and server-side application code—the code representing what is often called business logic —to generate and deliver dynamic content, such as transaction results, decision support, or real-time analytics. In practice, however, the line between web servers and application servers has become fuzzier, particularly as the web browser has emerged as the application client of choice and as user expectations of web applications and web application performance have grown.
Most web servers support plug-ins for scripting languages e. And an increasing number of application servers not only incorporate web server capabilities, but use HTTP as their primary protocol and support other protocols e.
They also allow web applications to leverage services like reverse proxy, clustering, redundancy, and load balancing —services that improve performance and reliability and allow developers to focus less on infrastructure and more on coding.
To make matters more confusing, many web servers and some application servers are referred to, or refer to themselves, as web application servers. Most of the increasingly rich applications you use today feature a combination of static web content and dynamic application content, delivered via a combination of web server and application server technologies.
It depends on the specific architecture. Drawing my conclusion from posts of awesome SO evangelists above, I conclude that both are software that resides on actual metal servers physical servers. Both work hand in hand to get service to the end-user.
Then, depending on the setup, we can choose what to call it, which means how to describe it depends on the actual setup in use. If they both reside on the same bare metal physical server , we call it web and application server If on separate machines, obviously, we have two distinct bare metals physical servers at our hands. Then we can label these servers according to their function: one web server and the other application server.
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Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. What is the difference between application server and web server? Ask Question. Asked 12 years, 5 months ago. Active 10 months ago. Viewed k times. Improve this question. Palec TwiggedToday TwiggedToday 9, 7 7 gold badges 23 23 silver badges 16 16 bronze badges. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Most of the times these terms Web Server and Application server are used interchangeably.
Improve this answer. Knowledge Craving 7, 12 12 gold badges 47 47 silver badges 90 90 bronze badges. Rutesh Makhijani Rutesh Makhijani Nice explanation, since we can use application server instead of web server what are the advantages of having a web server and application server both for a single application?
And performance wise what is the best option? And that's not really an accurate statement. Apache Tomcat is an application server.
Sure, it can serve web pages as well, but it's an application server for deploying Java. I realize a lot use the term "web server" loosely. But it just confuses people. Apache Tomcat is not a web server, it is an application server that runs Java servelets. Apache HTTP server is a web server. Show 5 more comments.
An example: The best way to understand the difference between the scenarios where an application server works with the web server versus a scenario where there isn't an application server is through an online store. Scenario 1: Web server without an application server you have an online store with only a web server and no application server.
Scenario 2: Web server with an application server if the query you want to run has already been done previously and no data has changed since then, the server will generate the results without having to send the request to the database server. Adrian Mole Durai Amuthan. H Durai Amuthan. Considering web only: A web server includes software apache, nginx to handle web requests http. They might be the same machine, they might not - for example it'd be considered normal to have nginx on one machine web server forwarding requests to php-fpm on a different machine application server which doesn't itself have any http access only exposing the port for php-fpm itself.
My point there is the application server may handle http requests, it's by no means a requirement. After re-reading the examples given, I don't see any real clarity here - the descriptions relate mostly to caching.
What aught to be clear is that a webserver is software, an application is software. Like Article. Last Updated : 12 Jul, Previous Web Server and Its Type. Next Difference between Apache Tomcat server and Apache web server. Recommended Articles. Article Contributed By :. Easy Normal Medium Hard Expert. Writing code in comment?
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