Application Server Software

TrustRadius Top Rated for 2023

Top Rated Products

(1-1 of 1)

1
IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition

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…

All Products

(1-25 of 43)

1
Oracle WebLogic Server

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.

2
NGINX

NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure…

3
IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition

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…

4
Microsoft IIS

Microsoft IIS is an application server and infrastructure.

5
Apache Tomcat

Tomcat is an open-source web server supported by Apache.

6
Apache HTTP Server

Apache Web Server (Apache HTTP Server) is an open source HTTP web server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows.

7
Microsoft Application Server (deprecated)

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…

10
FitNesse

FitNesse is an open source fully integrated standalone wiki web server and acceptance testing framework.

11
Oracle GlassFish Server

Oracle GlassFish Server was originally developed by Sun Microsystems and is available open source or supported by Oracle. It is an application server.

12
NGINX Plus

NGINX Plus is presented as a cloud‑native, easy-to-use reverse proxy, load balancer, and API gateway, from F5.

13
Payara Server

Payara Server is a fully supported, developer-friendly, open source application server. The vendor says Payara Server’s architecture is innovative, cloud-native and optimized for production deployments. The application server is built and supported by a team of DevOps engineers dedicated…

14
Pivotal tc Server

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.

15
IBM CICS Transaction Server

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.

16
Magic xpa Application Platform

Magic xpa Application Platform is an application server and infrastructure from Magic Technologies in California.

17
IBM Cloud Pak for Applications

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,…

18
TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid

ActiveMatrix Service Grid is an SOA governance and application server, from TIBCO.

19
Quantum VS1110-A

The Quantum VS1110-A is an application server designed for building automation systems that require the highest levels of availability. The hardware is purpose-built for performance and redundancy, and the software provides for virtual machine (VM) failover between servers in a highly…

20
Mongrel2
0 reviews

Mongrel2 is an application, language, and network architecture agnostic web server that focuses on web applications using modern browser technologies.

21
Unicorn Web Server

Unicorn is a Rack HTTP server to serve Ruby web applications on UNIX environment.

22
Lighttpd
0 reviews

lighttpd is presented as a webserver designed and optimized for high performance environments, boasting a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, SCGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and…

23
Cherokee Web Server

Cherokee is an open source enterprise web server.

24
Tencent Global Application Acceleration Platform (GAAP)

Leveraging high-speed connections, forwarding clusters and intelligent routing technology for global nodes, Global Application Acceleration Platform (GAAP) from Tencent is designed to enable users to access the origin server through a high-speed connection with the help of the nearest…

25
Pramati
0 reviews

Pramati, from Indian company Pramati Technologies, is an application server and infrastructure.

Learn More About Application Server Software

What is Application Server Software?

An Application Server provides services and infrastructure for developing, deploying, and running applications.

Application Server Software Features & Capabilities

  • Ease of download and installation

  • Support for a number of different programming environments or IDEs

  • Simultaneous support for multiple applications

  • Adequacy of documentation and user community vibrancy

  • Overall performance including deploy time, initialization time etc.

  • Compliance with open standards like Java EE and DSHi

  • Administration console for managing application and environment


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.

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.

Application Server vs. Web Application Server

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.

Pricing Information

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.

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