Application server

An application server, in n-tier software structural design, serves an API to expose trade logic and business procedure for use by third-party application.
The term can refer to:
1. The services that a server make accessible,
2. The computer hardware on which the services run,
3. The software framework use to host the services (such as JBoss application server or Oracle Application Server).

Contents

• 1 Java application servers
• 2 Microsoft platform
• 3 Zend platform
• 4 Other platforms
• 5 Advantages of application servers
• 6 See also
• 7 External links
• 8 Footnotes

Java application servers

Follow the victory of the Java display place, the term application server many times refers to a J2EE or Java EE 5 application server. A few of the better-known Java Enterprise Edition application servers include:

• WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Application Server communication Edition (IBM)
• Sybase Enterprise Application Server (Sybase Inc)
• WebLogic Server (Oracle)
• JBoss (Red Hat)
• JRun (Adobe Systems)
• Apache Geronimo (Apache Software Foundation)
• Oracle OC4J (Oracle)
• Sun Java System Application Server
(based on GlassFish Application Server)(Sun Microsystems)
• SAP Netweaver AS (ABAP/Java) (SAP)
• Glassfish Application Server (open source)
• WebObjects (Apple Inc.)

The web module includes servlets and JavaServer Pages. Trade logic reside in Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB-3 and later). The Hibernate project offers an EJB-3 container completion for the JBoss application server. Tomcat from Apache and Jonas from Object Web exemplify typical containers which can store these modules. A Java Server Page (JSP) (a servlet from Java) execute in a web container — the Java equal of CGI scripts. JSPs give a mode to produce HTML pages by embed references to the server logic inside the page. HTML coders and Java programmers can work side by side by referencing each other's code from within their own. JavaBeans are the sovereign class mechanism of the Java architecture from Sun Microsystems. The application servers mention above mainly serve web applications. A number of application server’s objective networks other than web-based ones: Session Initiation Protocol servers, for instance, target telephony networks.

Microsoft platform

Microsoft has contributed the .NET Framework to the world of application servers. .NET technology includes the Windows Communication Foundation, .NET Remoting, ADO.NET, and ASP.NET along with several other components. It works with (or depends upon) other Microsoft products, for example Microsoft Message Queuing and Internet Information Services.

Zend platform

Zend offers an application server called Zend Server — used for running and organization PHP applications.

Other platforms

Open-source application servers also arrive from other vendors. Examples include Appaserver, Base4, Zope and Spring Framework. The IRB is a Ruby programming language server Non-Java offerings have no formal interoperability condition on a par with the Java Specification Request. As a result, interoperability among non-Java products is poor compare to that of Java EE based products. To address these shortcomings, specifications for enterprise application integration and service-oriented architecture were designed to connect the lots of different products. These specifications include trade Application Programming Interface, Web Services Interoperability, and Java EE Connector Architecture.

Advantages of application servers

Data and code integrity

By centralizing business sense on an individual server or on a miniature number of server machines, updates and upgrades to the application for all users can be guaranteed. Here is no risk of old versions of the application access or manipulating data in an older, incompatible manner.

Centralized configuration

Changes to the application configuration, such as a shift of database server, or organism settings, can take place centrally.

Security

A middle point during which service-providers can manage access to data and portions of the application itself count as a security benefit, devolving liability for authentication away from the potentially insecure client layer without exposing the database layer.

Performance

By preventive the network traffic to performance-tier traffic the client-server model improves the performance of large applications in heavy usage environment.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

In mixture, the benefits above may result in cost savings to an organization mounting project applications. In practice, however, the technical challenges of marks software that conforms to that paradigm, combined with the need for software distribution to distribute client code, somewhat negate these benefits.

Transaction Support

Transactions characterize a unit of activity in which a lot of update to resources can be completing atomic. End-users can benefit from a system-wide standard behaviour, from reduced time to develop, and from reduced costs. As the server does a lot of the tedious code-generation, developers can focus on business logic.