Why are Application Servers so Web-Centric?

[Alok Pota]

We would like to use infrastructure services provided by a J2EE Application Server (connection, JNDI) in a web-less back/end application.

Is there a way to get that?

[Chris Mathews]

Originally posted by Alok Pota:
We would like to use infrastructure services provided by a J2EE Application Server (connection, JNDI) in a web-less back/end application.

There is no issue with this. Why do you feel that this would be a problem?
Application Servers are not web-centric. They are J2EE-centric. It just so happens that most J2EE Applications have web front-ends.

[Matthew Phillips]

EJBs are accessible via thick clients using RMI-IIOP, and I believe there is a way to do it using CORBA. Instead of using HTML (servlets, jsp, etc.) you could use Swing, AWT, or a similar technology for your client side.

[Stan James]

It's easy to mix up web server bits and app server bits. J2EE specifies both types of containers, and many articles and posts are not clear which one they are talking about all the time. But you can certainly use either container without the other - Java fat client to EJB server is just normal use of the remote access portion of EJB.