The Difference Between Web Server and Application Server

In layman's terms, the Web server transmits pages to enable the browser to browse, but the application server provides methods that the client application can call.
To be precise, you can say that the web server specializes in handling HTTP requests, but the application server serves the business logic for the application through many protocols.

Web server

The web server can handle the HTTP protocol. When the Web server receives an HTTP request , it will return an HTTP response (response), such as sending back an HTML page. In order to process a request, the web server can respond to a static page or picture, redirect the page, or delegate the generation of a dynamic response to some other program such as CGI Scripts, JSP (JavaServer Pages) scripts, servlets, ASP (Active Server Pages) scripts, server-side JavaScript, or some other server-side technologies.
Regardless of their (script) purpose, these server-side programs usually generate an HTML response to allow the browser to browse. Be aware that the delegation model of the Web server is very simple. When a request is sent to a Web server, it simply passes the request to the program that can handle the request (translator's note: server-side script).

The Web server only provides an environment that can execute server-side programs and return responses (produced by the program) without exceeding the scope of functions. Server-side programs usually have functions such as transaction processing, database connectivity, and messaging. Although the Web server does not support transaction processing or database connection pooling, it can be configured with various strategies to achieve fault tolerance and scalability, such as load balancing and caching. Clustering-features are often mistaken for only application server-specific features.

Application server

According to our definition, as an application server, it exposes business logic to client applications through various protocols, including HTTP. The Web server mainly processes HTML sent to the browser for browsing, while the application server provides a way to access business logic for use by client applications. The application uses this business logic as if you called a method of the object (or a function in a procedural language). The client of the application server (including the graphical user interface (GUI)) may run on a PC, a Web server, or even other application servers.

The information that travels back and forth between the application server and its clients is not limited to simple display marks. On the contrary, this kind of information is program logic. It is because this logic takes the form of data and method calls instead of static HTML, so the client can use this exposed business logic as he pleases. In most cases, the application server exposes the business logic (to the client application) through the component's application program interface (API), for example, based on J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) applications The EJB (Enterprise JavaBean) component model of the program server.

In addition, the application server can manage its own resources, such as gate-keeping duties including security, transaction processing, resource pooling, and messaging. Just like the Web server, the application server is equipped with a variety of scalability and fault tolerance technologies.

I believe that after reading this, you should have a simple understanding of the web server and the application server; all the theory is ultimately on paper, and the application is the foundation of everything.

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