What is the difference between service and server?

It seems that both service and server refer to some web based application. But is there any prec开发者_开发知识库ise definition of the two terms?

A server offers one or more services. Server is also a more technical term, whereas service is more a term off the problem domain.

You also need to distinguish between:

• Server as hardware (see post from Dan D)
• Server as software (eg. Apache HTTP server)

You can find more elaborate definiton on Wikipedia:

• Service
• Server

This is regardless of client-server or P2P models. A server provides services to one or more clients, and a server(hardware) is a computer. A server(hardware) can be anything from a home computer to a big server-rack with a lot of processor power. From the view of a computer, a server(software) is just a set of services which is available to clients on the network.

Some well known services are web-server, mail-server. ftp-server. notice they are called xxx-server because such programs consist of a client and server part. The postfix is mainly to distinguish whether we are talking about the client or the server.

So at what moment do we call something a server? We do it when a computer shares some service/content on the network, which is accessible by clients. In other words, when we make a server as defined for software.

Regarding the P2P model: every one is both a client and a server, hence called servent. The above apply to the server part of a P2P network, just remember that it also can be a client.

Futher reading:

Client-Server model

P2P

a server is a piece of hardware or on a virtual machine

a service is a process that provides services normally over the network and runs on a server

but a server can also refer to a web server which is actual a service but it's sort of like one as it hosts services

i think those are reasonable working definitions

I think a simpler way to define both besides the definition of the server being a piece of hardware, a server in the software sense is a service that serves data. In other words you interact with a server with a request and you should get a response back. It "serves" data.

A service does not need interaction and is pretty much just a random process that keeps running doing the same thing, but a server is a service because it is basically a process that keep waiting for a request to come in so that it can return a response.

"A service is a component that performs operations in the background without a user interface."
~ Android Developers

Services don't just run on servers

Shell services

Services can run from the shell. Unix refers to services as Daemons (pronounced "demons"), and Windows refers to them as services.

Client-side services

Services can run client-side. Mozilla (and other browsers) support Web Workers which run in a background thread. Client-side frameworks, like Angular, support services as well.