Definition of application server
An application server is a server that runs applications. The server provides hardware and software support for the applications. It runs web applications and exchange data with other servers.
How application server works
The application server is a server that hosts one or more applications. This server exchange data with the web server. A web server is a server that hosts static files like images, web pages, or videos. The application server hosts web services or database services.
If a web server needs any dynamic data like database or application data then it contacts the application server. The application server gets requests from the web server and processes the data and sends a reply to the web server.
An application server has security built in. For example, an IIS application server has a built-in security barrier. If the application is big and it needs to fulfil millions of requests then that application can be installed on multiple machines. So that there will be multiple application servers and one web server.
Types of application server
Some types of the application server are:-
Web information server:
This type of server gets data from the database and returns the pages with the data from the database. This type of server is named a stateless server.
Active application server:
This type of server builds business logic by consuming components, rules and objects. This type of server is also named a stateful server.
Component server:
This server is involved in transaction processing requests. It uses database access with other components like DLL, CORBA and Java Bean.
Benefits of application server
Some advantages of the application server are:-
- Security is high
- Easy to install applications
- It saves time
- Recovering data is easy
- Changing database servers is easy to handle
- The performance of applications becomes high
- Transaction support is provided
- It provides session management
- It moves requests among different servers accurately
Examples of application server
Some examples of the application server are:-
- Glassfish
- SAP Netweaver AS
- Websphere
- JBoss
- Jetty
- Oracle OC4J
- Tomcat Server
- JEUS
- JRun
- Weblogic
- Payara
- Apache Geronimo