[thelist] Whats the difference between an Application Server and a Web Server?

[VOLKAN ÖZÇELİK]

This would be classical but,

Any application server is also a web server.
However the converse is not true.

An App-server (say IBM Websphere App. Server) may act as a
web-container only serving servlets and jsp pages (a web archive (war)
file). Whereas it may also host an entire web apllication with
stateless/stateful enterprise beans, ejb-side helper classes etc.

The latter, would require us deploy a larger archive (ear file) which
includes the war file and ejb jar file along with vendor-specific
descriptors and classes.

Ear means: enterprise archive and it contains (better it may contain)
war (web archive) files.

So not going into too much detail I may say that --conceptually-- a
web server may be considered as a subset of an enterprise application
server.

HTH
--
Volkan Ozcelik
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