>There is one difference I care about: app servers are pre-packaged. I don't have to build a assemble an appserver from various parts by myself.
>This seems to be appealing to many "getting things done" devs as well. We should be careful with our message.
+1 Agreed to that, most important is get things working and meet the deadline, to be honest, most of our client doesn't care with I will run it inside a appserver or not, as long as it works asap.
>> For some people "Application Server" seems to mean e.g. a 2Gb WebSphere 6 installation that costed a million dollar, was installed years ago by an operations team, which nobody may ever touch, and for which developers may only provide wars. In such systems e.g. JSF can never be updated, since operations supposedly don't know what JSF is, and engineering who does is not allowed to touch the application server.
There's a lot of misconception against technologies, that's because things change, we can't burn everything to the ground and start a new one every time some folks stuck with a wrong idea of what a technology is. Some people still has a biased view against Java itself. I myself used to think that Eclipse was only an IDE, a slow one that took a lot of resources from my machine, but guess what? The community made me change my opinion, I think that's up to everyone of us who likes of this ecosystem to spread the news, that the things changed for better.