What is the difference between application server and web server?

Question

What is the difference between application server and web server?

Answer 1

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_server

A web server is a computer system that processes requests via HTTP, the basic network protocol used to distribute information on the World Wide Web. The term can refer to the entire system, or specifically to the software that accepts and supervises the HTTP requests.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_server#Application_Server_definition

An application server runs behind a web Server (e.g. Apache or Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS)) and (almost always) in front of an SQL database (e.g. PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Oracle).

Web applications are computer code which run atop application servers and are written in the language(s) the application server supports and call the runtime libraries and components the application server offers.