What is Application Server?

Before we roll into the concept of Application Server, I take you through the concept of Web Server.

• Web Server hosts static html pages and image
• Web Server uses http protocol

Apache HTTP Server (Initial Release, year 1995) and it was the first alternative for Netscape Web Server (Currently Oracle iPlanet). During mid 90’s, Corporate’s simply had few html pages to display their information.

The business’s wanted to do Ecommerce later when the Internet started becoming a household name. The online commerce applications needed to connect to Database, Main Frame, Email Server and other Messaging Systems inside the IT network to input, retrieve and send the data. However Web Server doesn’t have the ability to communicate with the above mentioned backend systems.

So the Application Developers developed an Interface between Web Server and the back end systems. The interface was made up of various languages like C, PHP, PERL, Java and all. It introduced majorly two problems to the businesses.

1) Every business had their own kind of technology stack for these interfaces. No standardization.

2) The job of the developer is to develop applications for the core business and not to develop code for standard things like connectivity to the database, connectivity to the email server etc. This approach increased the burden on the developers and businesses needed people with heterogeneous skill sets.

See the below diagram

Sun Microsystems thought about it and came up with J2EE (Java EE) frame work. The J2EE frame work (EJB, JDBC, JMS, JNDI, JSF, JSP, Servlet, RMI, Java Mail, JCE, JAAS, JACC, JCA, XML, JMX, JPA, JTA, RMI/IIOP and Web Services components) provides a standard way for Enterprise Application Integration and it lets the developers to focus on their business logic.

Sun wanted to spread this technology further and it allowed vendors to develop J2EE Application Servers by providing licenses. Sun kept the specification, rules and core library with them and companies like BEA, IBM, and Oracle got into the J2EE Application Server Market. During the period 1999-2001, there were more than 70 J2EE Application Servers in the market.

When a customer buys an Application Server, it provides the routine EAI in a configurable way and no need to code.

See the diagram below.

Today there are two major competitors in this J2EE Application Server market and they are Oracle WebLogic and IBM WebSphere. Other Application Server JBoss also has its own market share.

IBM is selling more than 20 products in the name of WebSphere so it seems it has more market share than Oracle WebLogic. Truly, Oracle WebLogic is No 1 in the market because of its flexibility, up to date alignment with J2EE and Scalability.