Is Tomcat a web server or an application server?
The Tomcat Manager is a web application that can be used interactively (via HTML GUI) or programmatically (via URL-based API) to deploy and manage web applications.
Apache Tomcat (called "Tomcat" for short) is a free and open-source implementation of the Jakarta Servlet, Jakarta Expression Language, and WebSocket technologies. It provides a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment in which Java code can also run.
The main difference between Web server and application server is that web server is meant to serve static pages e.g. HTML and CSS, while Application Server is responsible for generating dynamic content by executing server side code e.g. JSP, Servlet or EJB.
Tomcat is normally defined as a reference implementation of the Java Servlet and the Java Server Page (JSP) Specifications. It basically executes Java servlets and renders web pages which include JSP coding. It is available on the Apache site in both source and binary versions.
Tomcat is a web server (can handle HTTP requests/responses) and web container (implements Java Servlet API, also called servletcontainer) in one. Some may call it an application server, but it is definitely not an fullfledged Java EE application server (it does not implement the whole Java EE API).
Tomcat is an application container that is also a web server. An application container can run web-applications (have "application" scope). It is not considered Some people do not consider it a full application server as it is lacking in some aspects such as user management and the like, but getting better all the time..
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