Everything about Client Computing totally explained
A
client is an
application or system that accesses a remote service on another
computer system, known as a
server, by way of a
network. The term was first applied to
devices that were not capable of running their own stand-alone
programs, but could interact with remote computers via a network. These
dumb terminals were clients of the
time-sharing mainframe computer.
The
client-server model is still used today on the
Internet, where a
user may connect to a service operating on a remote system through the
internet protocol suite.
Web browsers are clients that connect to
web servers and retrieve
web pages for display. Most people use
e-mail clients to retrieve their
e-mail from their
internet service provider's mail storage servers.
Online chat uses a variety of clients, which vary depending on the chat protocol being used. Game Clients usually refer to the software that's the game in only multiplayer online games for the computer.
Increasingly, existing large client applications are being switched to websites, making the browser a sort of universal client. This avoids the hassle of downloading a large piece of software onto any computer you want to use the application on. An example of this is the rise of
webmail.
Types
Clients are generally classified as either "
fat clients", "
thin clients", or "
hybrid clients".
| | Local storage |
Local processing |
| Fat Client | |
|
| Hybrid Client | |
|
| Thin Client | |
|
Fat
A
fat client (also known as a
thick client or
rich client) is a client that performs the bulk of any data processing operations itself, and doesn't necessarily rely on the
server. The fat client is most common in the form of a
personal computer, as the personal computers or laptops can operate independently. Programming environments for rich clients include
Curl,
Delphi,
Droplets,
.Net,
Java,
win32 and
X11.
Thin
A
thin client is a minimal sort of client. Thin
clients use the resources of the host computer. A thin client's job is generally just to graphically display pictures provided by an
application server, which performs the bulk of any required data processing. Programming environments for thin clients include
JavaScript/
AJAX (client side automation),
ASP,
JSP,
Ruby on Rails, Python's
Django,
PHP and other (depends on server-side backend and uses HTML pages or rich media like Flash, Flex or Silverlight on client).
Hybrid
A
hybrid client is a mixture of the above two client models. Similar to a fat client, it processes locally, but relies on the server for storage data. This approach offers features from both the fat client (multimedia support, high performance) and the thin client (high manageability, flexibility)..
Further Information
Get more info on 'Client Computing'.
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