Some days ago, a coworker ask me the following question: Who is the appserver in .NET ...IIS, the OS, BizTalk, SQL Server ...after thinking for 5 seconds, I decided to anwser...well...it depends...could we all of them or neither.
What do you think about
Who is the appserver in .NET?...IIS, the OS, BizTalk, SQL Server?
VBnEWb
An application server typically provides the following services:
Application Connectivity is facilitated by IIS (for web apps), transactions are managed by Enterprise Services (or new inline transaction capabilities in .NET 2.0) with the help of DTC, component life time is managed by CLR, secuirty by a combination of IIS and ASP.NET and the list goes on.
Several components integral to the operating system provides the above services. So, you can say Windows server is the application server.
-Hanu
KUCL
From software engineering point of view, there are several services that an application server should offer. Moreover, today's business environment add some more services like workflow management and ESB stuff. Indeed, we see a lot of companies tend to use BPEL and ESB for integration, so we couldn't ignore those services.
As we know from J2EE case, some products like JBoss, offer much of these services under the title "Application Server". In MS-side, there is no such a single product. For instance, presentation layers mgmt. handled by IIS on transaction mgmt layer (aka COM+ >= COM + MTS ), then (not older versions) SQL Server 2005 for some native data mgmt. and modeling aspects. Moreover, Windows OS glue, stich those mechanisms together. And last, BPEL and workflow mgmt plus Ent. integration are established in Biztalk .
Thus, to me, AppServ in MS platform is all of them together. OR in other words, none of them, singly, is enough to be considered as "Application Server".
LessXa
Have a look here:
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Application Server page
Ananda Ganesh
.NET environment doesn't supply an app server environment in the same manner that J2EE servers does.
However as you mentioned there are several hosts in the windows/.NET environment that provide some of the capabilities of an application server (in the Java sense)
I think the primary candidate is COM+ (a.k.a. Enterprise Services) as a host it provides services such as security, transactions, pooling etc.
IIS which you mentioned, though it is less capable in comparison (with COM+).
SQL Server 2005 can also be considered an application server of sort (I don't think that earlier versions can qualify as application servers) - though it is not usually recommended to be used it as such (see also http://www.rgoarchitects.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,4dcc5298-e9ff-4a9a-880a-aa886d143f9e.aspx )
I wouldn't consider Biztalk as an application server (but I guess some people might). Workflow, business rules etc, are not conisdered (today) as application server capabilites (might change in the future)
Arnon