> In case you are honestly interested--although your hyperbole suggests otherwise--an app server then was what the docker daemon (or podman or other container launcher) would be now.
Sure. I have worked on JVMs before, but not server side, and I never had to touch anything sold by IBM.
> Arguably, CGI servers for php/python etc. were also a type of app server, although I rarely heard them referred to as such.
No, I think there's a difference. The deployment story for PHP was that you copied it to the web server and that was that. The mandatory part was a webserver you had anyway. There is FastCGI, but in PHP's case it can be thought of as purely a cache and is not necessary.
> App servers standardize what it means to start an application which makes operating many applications much easier.
A PHP web app does have some moving parts like needing to start nginx/fastcgi/mysql, so in that sense it still needs a container.
But the difference between the PHP source itself and Java is that PHP is 1. stateless and 2. doesn't take nearly as long to start up.
The first one is the big one and means you don't need to restart anything to update the app. This part of PHP is so well designed it practically makes up for how bad the rest of it is.
The second one was more of a Java flaw; the runtime is undercooked (which is why it had all that other super complex stuff on top of it) and everything has to go on the heap, instead of having more of a concept of constant data that could just be mapped in from the binary/jar file. That's what they got for not adding value types I guess.
Sure. I have worked on JVMs before, but not server side, and I never had to touch anything sold by IBM.
> Arguably, CGI servers for php/python etc. were also a type of app server, although I rarely heard them referred to as such.
No, I think there's a difference. The deployment story for PHP was that you copied it to the web server and that was that. The mandatory part was a webserver you had anyway. There is FastCGI, but in PHP's case it can be thought of as purely a cache and is not necessary.
> App servers standardize what it means to start an application which makes operating many applications much easier.
A PHP web app does have some moving parts like needing to start nginx/fastcgi/mysql, so in that sense it still needs a container.
But the difference between the PHP source itself and Java is that PHP is 1. stateless and 2. doesn't take nearly as long to start up.
The first one is the big one and means you don't need to restart anything to update the app. This part of PHP is so well designed it practically makes up for how bad the rest of it is.
The second one was more of a Java flaw; the runtime is undercooked (which is why it had all that other super complex stuff on top of it) and everything has to go on the heap, instead of having more of a concept of constant data that could just be mapped in from the binary/jar file. That's what they got for not adding value types I guess.