Is tomcat an application servers, and what are webshere and weblogic called?

[petereffect]

As tomcat doesnt support EJB etc can it be called an application
server? Also need to know are Websphere, Weblogic etc are Application
servers? can they be reffered as webservers?

 

[Simon Brooke]

in message <[email protected]>,

As tomcat doesnt support EJB etc can it be called an application
server? Also need to know are Websphere, Weblogic etc are Application
servers? can they be reffered as webservers?

Surprise, surprise, not all applications use EJB. An application server is
something that serves an application. Tomcat can serve all the
applications I've written in the last six years; therefore Tomcat is an
application server. Websphere and Weblogic are both capable of serving web
content; therefore they are web servers.

There is a certain horses for courses thing here. Weblogic may not be the
most efficient thing to use to serve web pages; it may be better at
serving applications. But in a marketplace where closed source products
compete with very good open source products, there is a tendency for the
closed source products to pile up 'features' to be able to produce
marketing ticklists to bullshit potential customers, whether or not
these 'features' deliver actual value.

I have twice - once back about 2002, once this year - had a serious look
Weblogic to see if it bought us anything over Tomcat, and both times the
conclusion of the exercise was that Tomcat was easier to configure, easier
to deploy, and delivered all our applications for less resource than
Weblogic. I appreciate that BEA Systems have to do something to
differentiate themselves in the marketplace, but I'm entirely unconvinced
that anything Weblogic currently does actually adds value.

 

[Manish Pandit]

Application Servers is an umbrella category for webservers/servlet
containers/J2EE servers.

A webserver is what your browser deals with. It serves content that
your browser renders. The content may be static, or may be generated on
the fly before serving via various plugins that the webserver is
configured with - example can be apache with php module.

In J2EE realm however, Tomcat is a servlet container, complying with
the Servlet and JSP standards of J2EE spec. Other servers that support
full J2EE spec, include a servlet container as well as an EJB
container. They include a lot more (like security) but that will be
going a little off-topic. Examples are BEA Weblogic, IBM Websphere,
etc. They may or may not come with their own HTTP servers (the
webservers) but most of them do. For instance, tomcat has its own HTTP
server, but it can also be front-ended with Apache.

You might want to google some of this stuff for examples and more
technical differences/similarities.

-cheers,
Manish