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NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX…
NGINX Plus is presented as a cloud‑native, easy-to-use reverse proxy, load balancer, and API gateway, from F5.
WebSphere Hybrid Edition from IBM is a collection of WebSphere application runtimes and modernization tools that provides support for on-premise and major public cloud deployments, in virtual machines, containers and Kubernetes. The user can choose any WebSphere edition and deploy…
IBM Cloud Pak® for Applications (CP4Apps) is an end-to-end hybrid cloud application platform, providing flexibility for deployments, building new cloud-native applications, refactoring and re-platforming existing applications. Designed to leverage a collection of application runtimes,…
Oracle WebLogic Server is a unified and extensible platform for developing, deploying and running enterprise applications, such as Java, for on-premises and in the cloud. WebLogic Server offers a scalable implementation of Java Enterprise Edition (EE) and Jakarta EE.
Apache Web Server (Apache HTTP Server) is an open source HTTP web server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows.
Payara Server is a fully supported, developer-friendly, open source application server. The vendor says Payara Server’s architecture is innovative, cloud-native and optim…
Zend Server, developed by Zend, acquired by Rogue Wave Software in 2017 and then by Perforce in 2019 with that company's acquisition of Rogue Wave, is an All-in-One PHP Application Server that aims to improve web app deployment, debugging, and monitoring. Additionally, ZendPHP Enterprise…
Application Server is an expanded server role in the Windows Server® 2008 operating system. It provided an integrated environment for deploying and running custom, server-based business applications. These applications respond to requests that arrive over the network from remote…
WildFly, the project formerly known as JBoss AS, is a Jakarta EE 10 Application Server, available for download free and open source under a Creative Commons license, and supported by Red Hat.
IBM CICS (Customer Information Control System) is mixed-language application server that runs on IBM z/OS. CICS® Transaction Server, often called CICS, is used for hosting transactional enterprise applications in a hybrid architecture.
Oracle GlassFish Server was originally developed by Sun Microsystems and is available open source or supported by Oracle. It is an application server.
Caddy 2 is an enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go. Caddy is presented as a solution to simplify an infrastructure, and runs in containers. It takes care of TLS certificate renewals, OCSP stapling, static file serving, reverse proxying, Kubernetes…
NGINX Unit, from F5, is a dynamic application server tailored to the demands of modern microservices.
Fly is a global JavaScript platform that enables users to build a CDN, as well as write, test, and run code locally, deploy it everywhere, and watch it scale. Fly runs physical servers in cities close to apps' users, according to the vendor, as close to the metal as possible without…
Subspace, headquartered in Playa Vista, California, offers a managed WebRTC service that routes traffic over highly available, low latency, global private network- and boasts simple configuration change. Subspace is built to optimize real-time application network traffic when every…
The Pivotal tc Server (formerly VMware vFabric tc Server) is a Lightweight Java application server that extends Apache Tomcat for use in large-scale mission-critical environments.
Magic xpa Application Platform is an application server and infrastructure from Magic Technologies in California.
An Application Server provides services and infrastructure for developing, deploying, and running applications.
Application servers are server programs in a computer in a distributed network that provide the business logic for an application program. As such they are the middle tier of a standard three-tier architecture.
In a three-tier client/server architecture, the application tier sits between the presentation tier and the data tier. The presentation tier displays information related to services available on a website. The backend data tier houses database servers where information is stored and retrieved. Data in this tier is kept independent of application servers or business logic.
In other words, when there is a request from the client, the application server process the business logic and makes a call to the database to retrieve the relevant data.
An application server is distinct from but often works in conjunction with, a web application server. A web server can only handle HTTP requests, while an application server can serve business logic via many different protocols. In a standard setup, the web server receives a request from the GUI or front end and then sends that request to the application server for business logic processing before it is sent back to the web application server and then back to the user via a modified web form.
In addition to processing application business logic, application servers have another function. They often simplify the building of client applications by providing the building blocks that help create the applications themselves. The best-known example is Java Beans in the J2EE environment. Indeed, application servers are closely associated with the J2EE standard. J2EE is an enterprise level Java application development platform.
Some applications like Apache Tomcat are open source. Commercial enterprise-level application server platforms are on-prem licensed software, and pricing starts at around $7,000.