Why use Glassfish instead of Apache? What's it strengths and weaknesses?

Question

Sorry for my ignorance here, but when I hear the word webserver, I immediately imagine Apache, although I know people use Microsoft\'s IIS too. However since I\'ve been hanging

Answer 1

The need for a seperate Web server is mostly needed in a production environment. You would normally find a Application server to be suffice most of your development needs. A web server is capable of holding larger number of active sessions and connections, thus providing the necessary balance without performance costs.

Stick to a simple web server if you are only working with servlets/jsps. It is also to be noted that in a netbeans environment, glassfish has better support than other App servers. In the context of eclipse though, WSAD and JBoss seem to the preferred options.