Explore Application Servers on Experts Exchange

An application server is a software framework that provides both facilities to create applications and a server environment to run them. Most application server frameworks contain a comprehensive service layer model, acting as a set of components accessible to the software developer through an API defined by the platform itself. For Web applications, these components are usually performed in the same running environment as their web server(s), and their main job is to support the construction of dynamic pages. However, many application servers target much more than just Web page generation: they implement services like clustering, fail-over, and load-balancing.