Updated: July 12, 2020 (September 23, 2002)

  Charts & Illustrations

Windows as an Application Server

My Atlas / Charts & Illustrations

443 wordsTime to read: 3 min
Rob Helm by
Rob Helm

As managing vice president, Rob Helm covers Microsoft collaboration and content management. His 25-plus years of experience analyzing Microsoft’s technology... more

COM+ and Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) play a central role in using Windows as an application server. Application servers provide a platform for running server applications that have high scalability and availability requirements. Microsoft ships application server capabilities in Windows servers rather than offering a separate application server product, such as BEA’s WebLogic Enterprise, IBM’s WebSphere Application Server, or Oracle9i Application Server.

Shown at the top is a typical business application whose code is divided into presentation (user interface), business logic, and data access tiers. At the bottom are the most important Windows services and APIs that perform application server functions. Windows .NET Server actually provides two families of APIs for these functions: .NET APIs that serve “managed” applications running under the .NET Framework and the original Win32 APIs serving “unmanaged” applications.

Presentation. The Internet Information Server (IIS) Web server enables server applications to present data and get input over Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP (the standard Web protocol), serving HTML to “thin” clients (browsers) or XML (via Web services) to “smart” clients that present a Windows graphical user interface (GUI). Managed applications generally access IIS through ASP.NET, while most unmanaged applications use the older Active Server Pages (ASP) API.

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