Which Web Application Server makes sense in today's technology landscape? You might be surprised.
Written by Joe Pluta
The concept of a Web Application Server (WAS) has been around for a long time and has seen a lot of evolution. Earliest WAS implementations grew out of the attempt to use HTML, designed primarily as a way to serve static data on request, as a way to provide business application functionality. This can be done only if the requests can serve up dynamic data. In the end, this means touching a database of some kind, so perhaps the simplest definition of a Web Application Server is a method of allowing a user with a browser to interact with a database using business logic. We can come up with edge conditions and extreme cases, but in the line of business that we midrange programmers support, that characterization is almost universally applicable. This article will explore the state of today's technology as it pertains to that description of WAS.