Why do companies need application servers? What is it displacing or augmenting?
Companies need an application server to deploy their enterprise applications on the Internet. When users access Web sites today, each of these Web sites itself is an application that receives the user’s request, processes it and provides the response. The system that runs these applications is called an application server. And why is the market growing? The market is growing for two reasons. First, customers are moving their applications from desktop computers to the Internet or corporate Intranets. Second, as applications move to the Web, the requirements on the infrastructure that is required to robustly run applications is becoming more complex, and application servers are evolving to meet these needs. Application servers are really substituting desktop personal computers as the location where applications primarily run. In the days of client-server computing, applications ran on desktop PCs and were accessed through Windows File Manager. With the Internet, applications now run on a
