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An application server is a server computer on a computer network dedicated to running certain software applications (as opposed to e.g. a file server or print server). more...
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Generally, an application server is a software engine that delivers applications to client computers. Moreover, an application server should handle most, if not all, of the business logic and data access of the application. The main benefits of application server technology are ease of application development and centralization. Although the term Application server applies to all platforms, it has become synonymous with the Sun Microsystems J2EE platform. It has also come to encompass servers of web-based applications, although the paradigm is more similar to mainframe based applications than traditional client-server.
Advantages of application servers
- Data and code integrity
- By centralizing business logic on an individual or small number of server machines, updates and upgrades to the application for all users can be guaranteed. There is no risk of old versions of the application accessing or manipulating data in an older, incompatible manner.
- Centralized configuration
- Changes to the application configuration, such as a move of database server, or system settings, can be done centrally.
- Security
- A central point through which access to data and portions of the application itself can be managed is considered a security benefit, devolving responsibility for authentication away from the potentially insecure client layer without exposing the database layer.
- Performance
- By limiting the network traffic to presentation layer traffic, it is perceived that the client-server model improves the performance of large applications in heavy usage environments.
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
- The above benefits combined are considered to represent a cost saving to a company. In practice, however, the technical challenges of writing software that conforms to that paradigm combined with the need for software distribution to distribute client code somewhat negate these benefits.
History
In the later part of the 1990s, it was thought that a massive shift over to centrally served applications was likely, and that the desktop PC would be replaced by lightweight network computers. This would have been a return to the much older model of computing as it was done in the 1960s, with a large, very expensive central computer being ac.
Java application servers
Following the success of the Java platform, the term application server sometimes refers to a J2EE application server. JBoss (Red Hat), JRun (Adobe), WebSphere (IBM), Oracle Application Server 10g (Oracle Corporation), Sun Java System Application Server and WebLogic (BEA) are the better known commercial J2EE application servers. GlassFish, an open source Application Server from Sun, is the first to provide a robust, commercial, compatible Java EE 5 implementation.
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