A lot of my developer friends pop up the question of why to use a webserver when today's application servers such as Weblogic, Websphere, Tomcat, JBoss etc. also have a HTTP listener. But in almost every architecture, we will see Apache in front of Tomcat, or IBM Http Server in front of WAS. The question is why?...and the answers are as follows:
- Webservers serve static content faster than application servers. Hence for performace reasons, it makes sense to shift all the static contect to the webserver. (J2EE developers hate this, as they now have to split the *.war files)
- The webserver can be put in a DMZ to enable enhanced security.
- The webserver can be used as a load balancer over multiple application server instances.
- The webserver can have agents/plug-in's to security servers such as Netegrity. Hence security is taken care by the webserver, putting less load on the application server.
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