Learn Basics of a Web server and Application Server

Learn Basics of a Web server and Application Server

Application servers and web servers are two types of servers needed to know in web application development in the software world. The developer writes the piece code, packs this code as war, and deploy/host the code in these.

one of the webserver or application servers, then users of the application can access the features of the application from anywhere in the world

Web server basics:-

Webservers are used to generate dynamic content as well as static content. Clients send the HTTP requests, process the request, and give a response back to the user. Web servers process the HTML content, images, stylesheets elements. Popular web servers are apache webserver and Microsoft IIS. The webserver is hardware and software, a machine which has IP Address assigned to the domain name, for example, a client browser request for wwww.domainname.com/index.html, webserver on that box request index.html content and gives back the response to the browser. This communication from client to the webserver is happening over HTTP protocol defined by w3c org web server is most basic server to know in web based application development.

The applications are packed as a folder as well as web archives developed in java, PHP, or Microsoft net technologies. the web server is used for small-scale projects.

Application Servers tutorial:-

Application Servers is a java server that provides different following sets of reusable following services.

Application servers uses in N-tier-based projects, in which webservers act as a front controller for application servers.

Application servers host the EJB projects in the form of ear i.e. enterprise archive structure which contains jars and war modules

1.Object lifecycle management:- This service is basic in any application server and creates a pool of objects, does garbage collection, and shares these objects states among user session calls. 2. Connection pooling:- Provides a pre-created pool of connections to the different databases and manages the connections, returns the connections to the pool whenever the connections are not used by the applications 3. Security Management:- application servers provide different levels of securities including authorization and authentication with different providers like databases realms, text files, and different LDAP Providers. Provides security at the domain object level, web resource level as well as web context level. 4.java messaging services:- Application servers provide build java messaging services as well as integrated with different JMS providers like SUN MQ providers. 5. Transaction management:- To maintain the ACID properties for the application transaction, application servers integrate with JTA and ORM Transactions 6. Load Balance and clusters:- To accommodate the load on the servers, a group of application servers act as a node, connected with a group of nodes, and serve the response even one of the nodes in the group of nodes fails. 7. Fault Tolerance: - application servers provide the 99.999 up a time to provide the reliable application with 367X24 uptime.

I have listed a few services here, but there are more services provided by application servers. Developers need not write the above services when developing any j2ee applications, and write their business functionality code and can reuse those above services

Difference between application server and webserver

Difference between the Application server and web servers is a basic interview question on j2eee world.

application servers are used to provide the different business services as mentioned below, web servers provide receives the request and get the dynamic content and send the response to the client.

Application servers are used in large-scale enterprise projects, web servers are used in small-scale projects.

the architecture for application servers is N-tier node architecture where many nodes are connected as the clustered environment.

the webserver can be used in 2 tier as well as n tier architecture, and act as a front controller for n tier architecture

The following are the list of popular application servers in java

  • apache Tomcat
  • Cache resin
  • BEA Weblogic later acquired by Oracle
  • Linux Jboss
  • IBM Websphere
  • SAP Netweaver WebAs 6.4
  • Oracle Application Server
  • Apache Geronima application server

List of popular web servers for **web application development

1. Apache webserver 2. Microsoft IIS