Jan K. Labanowski: "Tomcat, servlets, JSPs and other friends"

Approaches to process dynamic content

Web server minimal functionality is to serve static content, i.e., static files which are pointed to by the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier: http://logicerror.com/uri). Note, that the output produced by the dynamic component may not be the most important outcome (it may say: "Thank you for visiting", for example). Dynamic processing may create new files, send mail, search databases, and whatever else any software on this planet can do. Depending to its relation to the Web server the dynamic content can be served in 3 ways:
  • Standalone application
     
  • Integrated application
     
  • Application server