what is the ultimate difference?

S

SivaSankar.Battula

what is the difference between a webserver and an application server?
As per my knowledge,
A web server is a server which provides the implementation of HTTP
protocol.
An application server is a server which provides the implementation of
a Technology (suppose like EJB,..) which will be used to run the
Besiness Logic inside the server.
Now a days every web server vendors are crazy in giving a name as
application server to their web servers even if it supports only
Presentation Logic.
Can you tell me the guys ,any further more .....regarding this issue?
 
F

frozeninsight

Hi Siva.

Me thinks no diff.

What u say is correct.
All that EJB XML and other things only add to the already present web
server paradigm rather than providing a complete transormation.

Frozen Insight
 
D

David Segall

SivaSankar.Battula said:
what is the difference between a webserver and an application server?
As per my knowledge,
A web server is a server which provides the implementation of HTTP
protocol.
An application server is a server which provides the implementation of
a Technology (suppose like EJB,..) which will be used to run the
Besiness Logic inside the server.
Now a days every web server vendors are crazy in giving a name as
application server to their web servers even if it supports only
Presentation Logic.
Can you tell me the guys ,any further more .....regarding this issue?
They say that the best way to get the right answer on Usenet is to
post the wrong one so let me expose my naive view and say:

A web server needs to start a new task for every request it receives.
An application server is able to keep the application in memory and
service requests as threads in the resident task.
 
R

Roedy Green

A web server needs to start a new task for every request it receives.
An application server is able to keep the application in memory and
service requests as threads in the resident task.

That would have been true 8 years ago, but today you have simple HTTP
webservers that don't do things the CGI way. There are resident
Servlets just mindlessly serving webpages, perhaps with a little SSI.

The distinction comes into play mainly when you go to sign up with ISP
for a website. The big question is, do you want vanilla HTTP that
does nothing but serve webpages, and let users download files or do
you want to run some sort of custom code on the server?

The first would be webserver, the second an application server, even
if all it did was a little JSP boilerplate.
 
F

frozeninsight

Hi Everyone,

So the conclusion is That both are same just the services (behind the
scene) differ.

Frozen Insight.
 
L

Lasse Reichstein Nielsen

So the conclusion is That both are same just the services (behind the
scene) differ.

In the same sense that a pizza and a donut are the same, it's just the
contents that differ. I.e., no.

A web server serves web pages. It might have some fancy logic behind
it, but its interface is the HTTP protocol.

An application server is a more generic server, which doesn't need
to serve web pages at all. It runs applications, and all sorts of
clients can connect to it in different ways.

Often, an application server (like a JavaEE server) will also contain
a web server as *one* of the ways of communicating.
/L
 
T

Thomas G. Marshall

Lasse Reichstein Nielsen coughed up:
In the same sense that a pizza and a donut are the same, it's just the
contents that differ. I.e., no.

A web server serves web pages. It might have some fancy logic behind
it, but its interface is the HTTP protocol.

An application server is a more generic server, which doesn't need
to serve web pages at all. It runs applications, and all sorts of
clients can connect to it in different ways.

Often, an application server (like a JavaEE server) will also contain
a web server as *one* of the ways of communicating.
/L

I believe your explanation of this to be the most complete, however I would
have to /partially/ agree with frozeninsight, only because two terms have
started to blend together, at least conversationally.

More precisely, web servers aren't often called app servers, but app servers
are almost always refered to as web servers, even if strictly speaking HTTP
is only 1/10th of what it's doing. This is how the conversations seem to
run, but of course YMMV.
 

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