An application server that provides the facilities for running Java servlets. Also called a "servlet engine" and "servlet womb," examples of servlet containers are JServ and Tomcat from the Apache Jakarta Project. Today, servlet containers also support JavaServer Pages (JSPs) by converting them to servlets. For example, Tomcat supports JSPs, but its predecessor, JServ, did not. Full-blown Java EE-compliant application servers generally handle servlets, JSPs and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs). See
servlet,
JSP and
EJB container.