Web servers provide your application a gateway to the world: this is where requests for data for a complex web app and resources for a website go in and out. The range of Open Source solutions in this area is diverse and mature, and many of the solutions listed here represent the industry standard in their area of specialization. The specialization of web servers ranges from a focus on delivering static files in a performant manner and providing networking features such as load balancing and optimization features of nginx to the ability to set up a web server with integrated complex business logic using Node.js.
We use these open source web servers:
If you're into Open Source web servers, you can't get around Apache's software solutions. Apache Tomcat is an Open Source web server and web container that implements Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages, Java Expression Language and Java WebSocket technologies. Top developers worldwide are continuously working on the further development of the solution in an open environment. Apache Tomcat is used for numerous web applications in a wide range of industries and organizations.
JBoss' Open Source solutions are mostly available for free download – together, the various applications make up a complete Open Source J2EE middleware framework. The term JBoss is often used synonymously for the JBoss Application Server, now renamed WildFly Application Server, an Open Source alternative to commercial offerings such as IBM WebSphere Application Server or Oracle BEA Services. JBoss was acquired by Red Hat from 2006.
NGINX is a web server software, reverse proxy as well as email proxy, which according to its own information is used by around 400 million websites. Well-known users include GitHub, WordPress and Netflix. The solution is modular and very popular due to its high flexibility, performance and configurability. The strengths of NGINX show especially with static content or a large number of simultaneous requests: here, the solution often performs better than other web servers in tests in terms of performance. Since 2019, NGINX belongs to the American company F5.
Javascript used in backend is no new phenomenon. All kinds of Open Source projects have been built around Javascript for years and the community around the language is one of the largest of all in IT. By means of the modular package manager NPM the distribution of code has become so easy that hardly any logic has to be written twice. For developers coming from the web frontend, NodeJS is nothing more than a new framework, but with which they can suddenly program web servers or Api backends. Thus the way to full-stack development is not far. NodeJS offers only advantages:
- Same language as in the frontend
- End To End tests as in the frontend
- Package manager with huge community
- Continuous development