Web Servers , Web Containers & Application Servers

Web Servers

Web Servers accept http requests from the clients and serve them with http responses.
A web application runs within the web container of a web server.

Eg: Apache

Web Containers

Web Containers provide an environment to run Servlets and JSPs. It implements the web component contract of the J2EE architecture which specifies a runtime environment for web components that includes security, concurrency, life-cycle management, transaction, deployment, and other services.

At the beginning tomcat was just a servlet container and was not able to handle web requests on its own. It was also much slower and was not able to support heavy traffic production environments and it did not support SSL. As a result it was used in conjunction with the Apache web server to gain higher performance and security.

Over time Tomcat was improved as a standalone web server and running it alone was faster or just as fast as running it in conjunction with Apache Web Server.The current tomcat also has full support for SSL.


Eg: Tomcat

Application Servers

Application Servers provide a J2EE platform for the development, deployment, and management of enterprise applications. It provides an applet container, a Web container, and an EJB container.

Eg: JBOSS , Websphere