Understanding what Application Server is ??
Before discussing about the Application Server, lets have a look at what webservers are/were?
Lets refer Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia for this purpose:
The term web server can mean one of two things:
- A computer program that is responsible for accepting HTTP requests from web clients, which are known as web browsers, and serving them HTTP responses along with optional data contents, which usually are web pages such as HTML documents and linked objects (images, etc.).
- A computer that runs a computer program as described above
Going back to era when we used web servers, what used to happen was, developers used to develop the pages the HTML pages and now the main purpose of these page being getting developed was to serve the customers. To make these developed pages available to the customers these were being hosted on the web servers. Once hosted on the web servers these page(s) we available to the users and the users can now use it.
Coming to the present time, the customer/user/business needs for the services are growing and catering these huge needs obviously requires applications with complex logics.
Once the developers understand the business needs they develop the application, and for this application to be available to all the users for whom it is being developed, it is deployed on the Application Server.
Whenever you go to a Supermarket u see the cashier working on an Application that does the billing stuff for you, that application is also deployed on the Application Server.
Hope u now understand what Application Server is in general terms.
CHEERS !!!
