Application Server

An application server is a server that hosts applications[1] or software that delivers a business application through a communication protocol.[2]

An application server framework is a service layer model. It includes software components available to a software developer through an application programming interface. An application server may have features such as clustering, fail-over, and load-balancing. The goal is for developers to focus on the business logic.[3]

Java application servers

Jakarta EE (formerly Java EE or J2EE) defines the core set of API and features of Java application servers.

The Jakarta EE infrastructure is partitioned into logical containers.

• EJB container: Enterprise Beans are used to manage transactions. According to the Java BluePrints, the business logic of an application resides in Enterprise Beans—a modular server component providing many features, including declarative transaction management, and improving application scalability.
• Web container: the web modules include Jakarta Servlets and Jakarta Server Pages (JSP).
• JCA container (Jakarta Connectors)
• JMS provider (Jakarta Messaging)

Commercial Java application servers have been dominated by WebLogic Application Server by Oracle, WebSphere Application Server from IBM and the open source JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) by Red Hat.

Microsoft

Microsoft’s .NET positions their middle-tier applications and services infrastructure in the Windows Server operating system and the .NET Framework technologies in the role of an application server.[4] The Windows Application Server role includes Internet Information Services (IIS) to provide web server support, the .NET Framework to provide application support, ASP.NET to provide server side scripting, COM+ for application component communication, Message Queuing for multithreaded processing, and the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) for application communication.[5]

PHP application servers

PHP application servers run and manage PHP applications.

• Zend Server, built by Zend, provides application server functionality for the PHP-based applications.
• appserver.io, built by TechDivision GmbH is a multithreaded application server for PHP written in PHP.
• RoadRunner, built by Spiral Scout is a high-performance PHP application server, load-balancer, and process manager written in Go.

Third-party

• Mono (a cross platform open-source implementation of .NET supporting nearly all its features, with the exception of Windows OS-specific features), sponsored by Microsoftand released under the MIT License

Mobile application servers

Mobile application servers provide data delivery to mobile devices.

Information Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_server