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May I know the differences between application servers and web servers? Please list examples of each.
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Web servers handle HTTP requests and responses only. An application server exposes business logic to the clients, which generates dynamic content. It is a software framework that transforms data to provide the specialized functionality offered by a business, service, or application.
Apache Tomcat (Link resides outside IBM) is an open source application server that executes Java Servlets, renders and delivers web pages that include JavaServer Page code, and serves Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) applications. Released in 1998, Tomcat is the most widely used open source Java application server.
The difference is that a web application will reside in the server instead of the client's computer and will process everything in the server - but , the control of the program is left for the client. A good example for a web application is this site.
It is a type of server designed to install, operate and host associated services and applications for the IT services, end users and organizations. The Example of Application Servers are: JBoss: Open-source server from JBoss community. Glassfish: Provided by Sun Microsystem.
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.
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