Application Servers

The term application server applies to all platforms, but became heavily identified with Sun Microsystem platforms, however, it has also come to encompass servers of web based applications, such as integrated platforms for e-commerce. In the same way that relational databases are the implementation of the relational model, application servers are the implementation of the EJB model. There is nothing stopping you from having several application servers running on a single physical server machine. An application server should handle most, if not all, of the business logic and data access of the application.