Introduction

Application servers are one of the most popular types of middleware in the IT industry today. Application servers have become the cornerstone of many electronic businesses on the Internet. In the following pages, we'll introduce you to application servers, and also discuss their performance characteristics, cover methods for improving the performance and high availability of an application, and provide Linux-specific information for managing application servers.

We assume you have a good understanding of web servers, including some of the key technologies surrounding web servers such as HTTP, HTML, and CGI. Knowledge of Java and J2EE is also helpful but not necessary.