Managing Commerce Sites and Applications
An application is a group of pages, scripts, and components that perform tasks for a Web site. An application space represents the Web address that a Web client accesses. When you add an application to Commerce Server, the Administration database is updated with the configuration data for the application. When you add a Web server to the application, the Web pages are installed on the Web server computer.
When a Commerce Server site is unpacked, it typically installs five applications: one for the Web site that users access, and one for each of the Commerce Server Web services used to manage that site—Catalog, Marketing, Orders, and Profiles. An application can use only the resources of the Commerce site it belongs to.
An application includes its own Web servers, which in turn serve the Web pages for the Web site. An application may include multiple Web servers. An application always includes at least one Web server. You can set up an application at the root level of an Internet Information Services (IIS) Web site or at a virtual directory any number of levels below the root.