Hardware manual

48 Chapter 2 Inside Mac OS X Server
Application Server Support
An application server is software that runs and manages other applications, usually
web applications, which are accessed using a web browser. The managed applications
reside on the same computer where the application server runs.
One of the duties of the application server is to make sure the applications it manages
are always available. For example, if an application fails or becomes unresponsive, the
application server restarts it. Some application servers provide load balancing, which
spreads application load among two or more computers.
This section highlights three integrated application server technologies that Mac OS X
Server offers: Apache Tomcat, JBoss, and WebObjects. All of them are preinstalled with
the server and can be used in conjunction with Apache Axis, which is also preinstalled.
Axis is an open source Java framework for implementing web services over XML-based
SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). For more information about SOAP, go to:
www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/
The web technologies administration guide provides more information about open-
source applications and modules included with Mac OS X Server.
Apache Tomcat
Tomcat is an open-source JavaServer Pages (JSP)/servlet container used in the official
Reference Implementation for the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies.
 The specification for Java Servlet is at java.sun.com/products/servlets/.
 The specification for JavaServer Pages is at java.sun.com/products/jsp/.
JBoss
JBoss is a widely used full-featured Java application server. It provides a full Java 2
Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technology stack with features such as:
 An Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) container
 Java Management Extensions (JMX)
 Java Connector Architecture (JCA)
Mac OS X Server provides easy-to-use graphical tools for configuring and monitoring
JBoss and simplifying the deployment of JBoss applications. The Java application server
guide describes how to manage Mac OS X Server’s JBoss server, and is available from
www.apple.com/server/documentation/.
 For more information about J2EE, see java.sun.com/j2ee/.
 For more information about JBoss, see www.jboss.org/.
By default, JBoss uses Tomcat as its web application container, but you can use other
web application containers, such as Jetty.