What is the difference between application server and web server

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Drawing my conclusion from posts of awesome SO evangelists above, I conclude that both are software that resides on actual metal servers(physical servers). Both work hand in hand to get service to the end-user. Then, depending on the setup, we can choose what to call it, which means how to describe it depends on the actual setup in use. If they both reside on the same bare metal(physical server), we call it web and application server...simple! If on separate machines, obviously, we have two distinct bare metals(physical servers) at our hands. Then we can label these servers according to their function: one web server and the other application server.

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web server  for every URL  it returns a file  That s all it does  The file is static content  meaning  it is stored somewhere in the server  before you make your request  Most popular web servers are apache http and nginx  application server  for every URL  it runs some code  written in some language  generates a response  and returns it  The response doesn t exist in advance  it is generated for your particular request  that is  it is dynamic content  Application servers are different for each language  Some popular examples are tomcat jetty for java  uwsgi gunicorn for python   Almost every page you visit uses both  The static content  eg  images  videos  is served by the web server  and the rest  the parts that are different between you and other users  are generated by the application server

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This is a detailed answer with some scenarios to clearly understand the difference and similarity  and how both can work in conjunction  Application Server is a term that sometimes is mixed with a web server  While a web server handles mainly HTTP protocols  the application server deals with several different protocols  including  but not limited  to HTTP  The Web server s main job is to display the site content and the application server is in charge of the logic  the interaction between the user and the displayed content  The application server is working in conjunction with the web server  where one displays and the other one interacts  The information traveling back and forth between the server and its client is not restricted to simple display markup  but to interaction between the two  In most cases  the server creates this interaction through a component API  such as J2EE  Java 2 Platform   EJB  Enterprise JavaBean  and other different application software models   An example  The best way to understand the difference between the scenarios where an application server works with the web server versus a scenario where there isn t an application server is through an online store  Scenario 1  Web server without an application server you have an online store with only a web server and no application server  The site will provide a display where you can choose a product from  When you submit a query  the site performs a lookup and returns an HTML result back to its client  The web server sends your query directly to the database server  be patient  I will explain this one in our next nugget  and waits for a response  Once received  the web server formulates the response into an HTML file and sends it to your web browser  This back and forth communication between the server and database server happens every time a query is run  Scenario 2  Web server with an application server if the query you want to run has already been done previously and no data has changed since then  the server will generate the results without having to send the request to the database server  This allows a real-time query where a second client can access the same info and receive real time  reliable information without sending another duplicate query to the database server  The server basically acts as an intermediate between the database server and the web server  This allows the information pulled to be reusable while in the first scenario  since this info is embedded in a particular and  quot customized quot  HTML page  this is not a reusable process  A second client will have to request the info again and receive another HTML embedded page with the info requested -highly inefficient  Not to mention that this type of server is very flexible due to its ability to manage its own resources  including security  transaction processing  messaging and resource pooling  To support such a variety of complex tasks this server must have a built in redundancy  great processing power and high amount of RAM to handle all the data it s pulling in real time

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Both terms are very generic  one containing the other one and vice versa in some cases    Web server  serves content to the web using http protocol  Application server  hosts and exposes business logic and processes    I think that the main point is that the web server exposes everything through the http protocol  while the application server is not restricted to it   That said  in many scenarios you will find that the web server is being used to create the front-end of the application server  that is  it exposes a set of web pages that allow the user to interact with the business rules found into the application server

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In short  The web server is a server that serves static web pages to users via HTTP requests  The application server is a server that hosts the business logic for a system  It often hosts both long-running batch processes and or interop services not meant for human consumption  REST JSON services  SOAP  RPC  etc

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An application server is a machine  an executable process running on some machine  actually  that  listens   on any channel  using any protocol   for requests from clients for whatever service it provides  and then does something based on those requests    may or may not involve a respose to the client   A Web server is process running on a machine that  listens  specifically on TCP IP Channel using one of the  internet  protocols   http  https  ftp  etc     and does whatever it does based on those incoming requests    Generally   as origianly defined   it fetched generated and returned an html web page to the client  either fetched from a static html file on the server  or constructed dynamically based on parameters in the incoming client request

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Basic understanding    In client server architecture      Server    Which serves the requests       Client    Which consumes service    Web server  amp  Application server are both software applications which act as servers to their clients   They got their names based on their place of utilization   Web server   gt  serve web content              gt  Like Html components              gt  Like Javascript components              gt  Other web components like images resource files              gt  Supports mainly web protocols like http https               gt  Supports web Request  amp  Response formats       Usage --         we require low processing rates         regular processing practices involves        Eg  All flat servers generally available ready-made  which serves only web     based content    Application server   gt  Serve application content component data Business data                        gt  These are special kind which are custom written                        designed engineered for specific                       purpose some times fully unique in                        their way and stands out of the crowd                         gt  As these serves different types of data response contents                      gt  So we can utilize these services for mobile client web                        clients intranet clients                        gt  Usually application servers are services offered on different                        protocols                           gt  Supports different Request amp  Response formats       Usage --         we require multi point processing         specialized processing techniques involves like for AI        Eg  Google maps servers  Google search servers Google docs servers Microsoft 365   servers Microsoft computer vision servers for AI    We can assume them as tiers Hierarchies in 4-tier n-tier architecture     So they can provide                      load balancing                      multiple security levels                      multiple active points                      even they can provide different request processing environments    Please follow this link for standard architecture analogies   https   docs microsoft com en-us previous-versions msp-n-p ee658120 v 3dpandp 10

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The border between these two are getting ever so thinner   Application servers expose business logic to clients  That means application servers comprise of a set of methods  not exclusively though  can even be a networked computer allowing many to run software on it  to perform business logic  So it will simply output the desired results  not HTML content   similar to a method call   So it is not strictly HTTP based   But web servers pass HTML content to web browsers  Strictly HTTP based   Web servers were capable of handling only the static web resources  but the emergence of server side scripting allowed web servers to handle dynamic contents as well  Where a web server takes in the request and directs it to relevant scripts  PHP  JSP  CGI scripts  etc   to CREATE HTML content to be sent to the client  Once the content is received  web server will send the HTML page to the client   However  nowadays both these servers are used together  Where web server takes the request and then calls a script to create the HTML content  Then  the script will again call an application server LOGIC  e g  Retrieve transaction details  to fill the HTML content   So both the servers are used effectively    Therefore      We can safely say that nowadays  in most of the cases  web servers are used as a subset of application servers  BUT theatrically it is NOT the case   I have read many articles about this topic and found this article quite handy

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Most of the times these terms Web Server and Application server are used interchangeably   Following are some of the key differences in features of Web Server and Application Server    Web Server is designed to serve HTTP Content  App Server can also serve HTTP Content but is not limited to just HTTP  It can be provided other protocol support such as RMI RPC Web Server is mostly designed to serve static content  though most Web Servers have plugins to support scripting languages like Perl  PHP  ASP  JSP etc  through which these servers can generate dynamic HTTP content   Most of the application servers have Web Server as integral part of them  that means App Server can do whatever Web Server is capable of  Additionally App Server have components and features to support Application level services such as Connection Pooling  Object Pooling  Transaction Support  Messaging services etc  As web servers are well suited for static content and app servers for dynamic content  most of the production environments have web server acting as reverse proxy to app server  That means while servicing a page request  static contents  such as images Static HTML  are served by web server that interprets the request  Using some kind of filtering technique  mostly extension of requested resource  web server identifies dynamic content request and transparently forwards to app server   Example of such configuration is Apache Tomcat HTTP Server and Oracle  formerly BEA  WebLogic Server  Apache Tomcat HTTP Server is Web Server and Oracle WebLogic is Application Server   In some cases the servers are tightly integrated such as IIS and  NET Runtime  IIS is web server  When equipped with  NET runtime environment  IIS is capable of providing application services

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Web server  Run python -m  SimpleHTTPServer  and go to http   localhost 8080  What you see is a web server at its workings  The server simply serves files over HTTP stored on your computer  The key point is that all this is done on top of the HTTP protocol  There also exist FTP servers for example which do exactly the same thing  serving stored files  but on top of a different protocol   Application server  Say we have a tiny application like below  snippet from Flask     app route      def homepage        return   lt html gt My homepage lt  html gt     app route   about   def about        return   lt html gt My name is John lt  html gt     The small example program maps the URL   to the function homepage   and the  about to the function about     To run this code we need an application server  e g  Gunicorn  - a program or module that can listen for requests from a client and using our code  return something dynamically  In the example we simply return some very bad HTML   What s the business logic all the other people talk about  Well  since a URL maps to somewhere specifically in our codebase  we are hypothetically showing some logic about how our program works     Recapping  web server - serves files stored somewhere  most commonly  css   html   js   Common web servers are Apache  Nginx or even Python s SimpleHTTPServer   application server - serves files generated on the fly  Essentially most web servers have some sort of plugins or even come with built-in functionality to do that  There exist also strict application servers like Gunicorn  Python   Unicorn  Ruby   uWSGI  Python   etc   Notice that you can actually build a web server with the code of the application server  This is done in some cases during development where you do not want to have a gazillion of different servers running on your computer

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It depends on the specific architecture   Some application servers may use web protocols natively  XML RPC SOAP over HTTP   so there is little technical difference   Typically a web server is user-facing  serving a variety of content over HTTP HTTPS  while an application server is not user-facing and may use non-standard or non-routable protocols   Of course with RIA AJAX  the difference could be further clouded  serving only non-HTML content  JSON XML  to clients pumping particular remote access services

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An application server is typically designed and deployed to facilitate longer running processes that will also be more resource intensive   A web server is used for short bursts that are not resource intensive  generally   This is mostly to facilitate serving up web based traffic

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IMO  it s mostly about separating concerns   From a purely technical point of view  you can do everything  web content   business logic  in a single web server  If you d do that  then the information would be embedded inside requested the HTML content  What would be the impact   For example  imagine you have 2 different apps which renders entirely different HTML content on the browser  If you would separate the business logic into an app-server than you could provide different web-servers looking up the same data in the app-server via scripts  However  If you wouldn t separate the logic and keep it in the web-server  whenever you change your business model  you would end up changing it in every single web-server you have which would take more time  be less reliable and error-prone

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While there may be overlaps between the two  some web servers may even be used as application servers  the biggest difference IMHO is in the processing model and the session management   In Web server processing model  the focus is on handling requests  the notion of  session  is pretty much virtual  That  is to say that  session  is simulated by transferring the representation of state between client and server  hence REST  and or serializing it to an external persistent storage  SQL Server  Memcached etc     In Application server the session is usually more explicit and often takes form of an object living in memory of the application server for the entire duration of the  session

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A web server runs the HTTP protocol to serve web pages  An application server can  but doesn t always  run on a web server to execute program logic  the results of which can then be delivered by the web server  That s one example of a web server application server scenario   A good example in the Microsoft world is the Internet Information Server   SharePoint Server relationship  IIS is a web server  SharePoint is an application server  SharePoint sits  on top  of IIS  executes specific logic  and serves the results via IIS   In the Java world  there s a similar scenario with Apache and Tomcat  for example

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Actually Apache is a web server and Tomcat is an application server  When as HTTP request comes to web server  Then static contents send back to browser by web server  Is there and logic do to done  then that request send to the application server  after processing the logic then response send to web server and send to the client

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On a first hand  a web server serves web content  HTML and static content  over the HTTP protocol  On the other hand  an application server is a container upon which you can build and expose business logic and processes to client applications through various protocols including HTTP in a n-tier architecture    An application server thus offers much more services than an web server which typically include    A  proprietary or not  API Object life cycle management  State management  session   Resource management  e g  connection pools to database   Load balancing  fail over      AFAIK  ATG Dynamo was one of the very first application server in late 90 s  according to the definition above   In early 2000  it was the reign of some proprietary application servers like ColdFusion  CFML AS   BroadVision  Server-side JavaScript AS   etc  But none really survived the Java application server era

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As many have said before  web servers handle HTTP petitions  while application servers handle petitions for distributed components  So  maybe the easiest way to understand the difference is to compare the two products in regards to programming environment they offer  Web Server - gt  Programming Environment IIS                               ASP   NET  Tomcat                            Servlet Jetty                              Servlet Apache                            Php  CGI Application Servers - gt  Programming Environment MTS                                  COM  WAS                                 EJB JBoss                                EJB WebLogic Application Server          EJB The crucial difference is that application servers support some distributed component technology  providing features like remote invocation and distributed transactions  like EJB in Java world or COM  on Microsoft platform  Http server often support some more simple programming environments  often scripting  like ASP   NET  in case of Microsoft or Servlet--based  including JSP and many other in case of Java or PHP and CGI in case of Apache  Other capabilities like load-balancing  clustering  session-failover  connection pooling etc  that used to be in the realm of application servers  are becoming available on web servers as well directly or through some third party products  Finally  it is worth noting that the picture is further distorted with  quot lightweight containers quot  like Spring Framework  that often supplement the purpose of application servers in more simple manner and without the application server infrastructure  And since distribution aspect in applications is moving from distributed component towards service paradigm and SOA architecture  there is less and less space left for traditional application servers

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All of the above is just over-complicating something very simple  An application server contains a web server  an application server just has a couple more additions extensions to it than standard web servers  If you look at TomEE as an example   CDI - Apache OpenWebBeans EJB - Apache OpenEJB JPA - Apache OpenJPA JSF - Apache MyFaces JSP - Apache Tomcat JSTL - Apache Tomcat JTA - Apache Geronimo Transaction Servlet - Apache Tomcat Javamail - Apache Geronimo JavaMail Bean Validation - Apache BVal   You will see that Tomcat  Web container server  is just another tool in the app servers arsenal  You can get JPA and the other tech in the web server as well if you want  but the application servers just package all of these things for your convenience  To be fully classified as an app server you essentially need to comply with a list of tools set forth by some standard

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IBM makes a really nice comparison between the two   By strict definition  a web server is a common subset of an application server  A web server delivers static web content   e g   HTML pages  files  images  video   primarily in response to hypertext transfer protocol  HTTP  requests from a web browser  An application server typically can deliver web content too  but its primary job is to enable interaction between end-user clients and server-side application code   the code representing what is often called business logic   to generate and deliver dynamic content  such as transaction results  decision support  or real-time analytics  The client for an application server can be the application   s own end-user UI  a web browser  or a mobile app  and the client-server interaction can occur via any number of communication protocols  In practice  however  the line between web servers and application servers has become fuzzier  particularly as the web browser has emerged as the application client of choice and as user expectations of web applications and web application performance have grown  Most web servers support plug-ins for scripting languages  e g   ASP  JSP  PHP  Perl  that enable the web server to generate dynamic content based on server-side logic  And an increasing number of application servers not only incorporate web server capabilities  but use HTTP as their primary protocol and support other protocols  e g   CGI and CGI variants  for interfacing with web servers  They also allow web applications to leverage services like reverse proxy  clustering  redundancy  and load balancing   services that improve performance and reliability and allow developers to focus less on infrastructure and more on coding  To make matters more confusing  many web servers and some application servers are referred to  or refer to themselves  as web application servers  The bottom line is that today   s most popular web servers and application servers are hybrids of both  Most of the increasingly rich applications you use today feature a combination of static web content and dynamic application content  delivered via a combination of web server and application server technologies

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A Web server exclusively handles HTTP HTTPS requests  It serves content to the web using HTTP HTTPS protocol   An application server serves business logic to application programs through any number of protocols  possibly including HTTP   The application program can use this logic just as it would call a method on an object   In most cases  the server exposes this business logic through a component API  such as the EJB  Enterprise JavaBean  component model found on Java EE  Java Platform  Enterprise Edition  application servers  The main point is that the web server exposes everything through the http protocol  while the application server is not restricted to it  An application server thus offers much more services than an web server which typically include    A  proprietary or not  API  Load balancing  fail over     Object life cycle management State management  session  Resource management  e g  connection pools to database    Most of the application servers have Web Server as integral part of them  that means App Server can do whatever Web Server is capable of   Additionally App Server have components and features to support Application level services such as Connection Pooling  Object Pooling  Transaction Support  Messaging services etc    An application server can  but doesn t always  run on a web server to execute program logic  the results of which can then be delivered by the web server  That s one example of a web server application server scenario  A good example in the Microsoft world is the Internet Information Server   SharePoint Server relationship  IIS is a web server  SharePoint is an application server  SharePoint sits  on top  of IIS  executes specific logic  and serves the results via IIS  In the Java world  there s a similar scenario with Apache and Tomcat  for example   As web servers are well suited for static content and app servers for dynamic content  most of the production environments have web server acting as reverse proxy to app server  That means while service a page request  static contents such as images Static html is served by web server that interprets the request  Using some kind of filtering technique  mostly extension of requested resource  web server identifies dynamic content request and transparently forwards to app server   Example of such configuration is Apache HTTP Server and BEA WebLogic Server  Apache HTTP Server is Web Server and BEA WebLogic is Application Server  In some cases  the servers are tightly integrated such as IIS and  NET Runtime  IIS is web server  when equipped with  NET runtime environment IIS is capable of providing application services    Web Server                               Programming Environment Apache                                   PHP  CGI IIS  Internet Information Server         ASP   NET  Tomcat                                   Servlet Jetty                                    Servlet  Application Server                       Programming Environment WAS  IBM s WebSphere Application Server  EJB WebLogic Application Server  Oracle s    EJB JBoss AS                                 EJB MTS                                      COM

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Application server and web server both are used to host web application  Web Server is deal with web container on the other hand Application Server is deal with web container as well as EJB  Enterprise JavaBean  container or COM  container for Microsoft dot Net   Web Server is designed to serve HTTP static Content like HTML  images etc  and for the dynamic content have plugins to support scripting languages like Perl  PHP  ASP  JSP etc and it is limited to HTTP protocol  Below servers can generate dynamic HTTP content   Web Server s Programming Environment   IIS   ASP   NET   Apache Tomcat  Servlet  Jetty  Servlet  Apache  Php  CGI  Application Server can do whatever Web Server is capable and listens using any protocol as well as App Server have components and features to support Application level services such as Connection Pooling  Object Pooling  Transaction Support  Messaging services etc    Application Server s Programming Environment   MTS  COM   WAS  EJB  JBoss  EJB  WebLogic Application Server  EJB

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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   Which one should i use  Once you know the difference between web and application server and web containers  it s easy to figure out when to use them  You need a web server like Apache HTTPD if you are serving static web pages  If you have a Java application with just JSP and Servlet to generate dynamic content then you need web containers like Tomcat or Jetty  While  if you have Java EE application using EJB  distributed transaction  messaging and other fancy features than you need a full fledged application server like JBoss  WebSphere or Oracle s WebLogic   Web container is a part of Web Server and the Web Server is a part of Application Server     Web Server is composed of web container  while Application Server is composed of web container as well as EJB container

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Biggest difference is a Web Server handles HTTP requests  while an Application server will execute business logic on any number of protocols

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As Rutesh and jmservera pointed out  the distinction is a fuzzy one   Historically  they were different  but through the 90 s these two previously distinct categories blended features and effectively merged   At this point is is probably best to imagine that the  App Server  product category is a strict superset of the  web server  category   Some history   In early days of the Mosaic browser and hyperlinked content  there evolved this thing called a  web server  that served web page content and images over HTTP  Most of the content was static  and the HTTP 1 0 protocol was just a way to ship files around   Quickly the  web server  category evolved to include CGI capability - effectively launching a process on each web request to generate dynamic content   HTTP also matured and the products became more sophisticated  with caching  security  and management features  As the technology matured  we got company-specific Java-based server-side technology from Kiva and NetDynamics  which eventually all merged into JSP   Microsoft added ASP  I think in 1996  to Windows NT 4 0  The static web server had learned some new tricks  so that it was an effective  app server  for many scenarios    In a parallel category  the app server had evolved and existed for a long time  companies delivered products for Unix like Tuxedo  TopEnd  Encina that were philosophically derived from Mainframe application management and monitoring environments like IMS and CICS  Microsoft s offering was Microsoft Transaction Server  MTS   which later evolved into COM   Most of these products specified  closed  product-specific communications protocols to interconnect  fat  clients to servers    For Encina  the comms protocol was DCE RPC  for MTS it was DCOM  etc   In 1995 96  these traditional app server products began to embed basic HTTP communication capability  at first via gateways  And the lines began to blur   Web servers got more and more mature with respect to handling higher loads  more concurrency  and better features  App servers delivered more and more HTTP-based communication capability     At this point the line between  app server  and  web server  is a fuzzy one    But people continue to use the terms differently  as a matter of emphasis  When someone says  web server  you often think HTTP-centric  web UI  oriented apps  When someone says  App server  you may think  heavier loads  enterprise features  transactions and queuing  multi-channel communication  HTTP   more    But often it is the same product that serves both sets of workload requirements      WebSphere  IBM s  app server  has its own bundled web server  WebLogic  another traditional app server  likewise  Windows  which is Microsoft s App Server  in addition to being its File amp Print Server  Media Server  etc    bundles IIS

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In Java terms  there s one more  web container  or more strictly  servlet container   It s  say  in between web server and application server    A web container in Java terms is an application server that basically only implements the JSP Servlet part of Java EE and lacks several core parts of Java EE  such as EJB support  An example is Apache Tomcat

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From https   en wikipedia org wiki Web server  A web server is a computer system that processes requests via HTTP  the basic network protocol used to distribute information on the World Wide Web  The term can refer to the entire system  or specifically to the software that accepts and supervises the HTTP requests   From https   en wikipedia org wiki Application server Application Server definition  An application server runs behind a web Server  e g  Apache or Microsoft Internet Information Services  IIS   and  almost always  in front of an SQL database  e g  PostgreSQL  MySQL  or Oracle    Web applications are computer code which run atop application servers and are written in the language s  the application server supports and call the runtime libraries and components the application server offers

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There is not necessarily a clear dividing line   Nowadays  many programs combine elements of both - serving http requests  web server  and handling business logic  app server

[webserver] What is the difference between application server and web server?

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