Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!feeder.erje.net!eu.feeder.erje.net!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: markspace Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: What Application Server are you using? Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 10:24:34 -0700 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 39 Message-ID: References: <3843209b-7a1d-4812-a8dc-06738ed60658@googlegroups.com> <125b2d0f-c2b4-4d02-879b-3f0dc3ed59aa@googlegroups.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 17:24:38 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: mx05.eternal-september.org; posting-host="9358cda03e1e0dfd3c4b757daa608707"; logging-data="13673"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX19xPA+84pjzUHksToXz5SLCp5AMFkh6mWk=" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.3.0 In-Reply-To: <125b2d0f-c2b4-4d02-879b-3f0dc3ed59aa@googlegroups.com> Cancel-Lock: sha1:NG4ClqEKLL7lTvmxHB0PJxtskro= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.java.programmer:27752 More or less. Tomcat, JBoss, Glassfish, etc. are all applications to the Unix environment. (Or whatever environment/OS you run.) But in the parlance of web programming, your application is the thing that a client sees in their web browser. Both JBoss and Tomcat at least (and probably all other containers) are capable of running more than one application as a separate virtual host. Exactly like Apache is capable of running separate websites as virtual hosts. It's really a quibble over semantics. You could call a Java Enterprise Edition container a framework, but the entry point for the OS is the container itself, and the app runs as a series of callbacks. "Container" is just JEE parlance for the thing that does that work for you (processes incoming request, sends a response, connects to a DB, etc.) which conforms to their JEE specification of what a container does. In the same way we call a database a database even though it's really an application too, we have different names for different specific types of applications: demon, shell, name server, etc. Container is just one of those names. On 3/13/2014 9:24 AM, Robert Hutchings wrote: > Hi Robert, > > When we talk about "application servers" or "containers", what > exactly does this mean? These are, in themselves, applications, > correct? They are an application that enables other applications. > So, for example, Tomcat runs as an application or UNIX process(es) > and a Java servlet executes in the context of the Tomcat > instance...is that correct? > > I'm coming from a "mid-range background," Tandem NonStop and Windows > .NET via VB or C#. >