OpenEuphoria

1. RE: News You Can Use

• Posted by Matt Lewis <matthewwalkerlewis at yahoo.com> Jan 29, 2004
• 349 views

euphoric wrote:
> 
> 
> Derek Parnell wrote:
> 
> >One advantage of smart-client/server systems is that some of the 
> >computing work can be offloaded from the server to the client 
> >machine. One of the disadvantages is that it increases network 
> >traffic as a lot more information needs to be moved between the 
> >client and server machines.
> >  
> It doesn't seem like that much of an increase in traffic would be 
> necessary, unless I'm missing something. If you have an app running 
> on a client PC, it will simply be sending data to the server, and 
> vice versa, just like in a browser/server app situation now. 
> Where's the "lot more information?"

Like Derek said, it depends on your application.  Here's an extreme 
example where everything is going on at the client:

Suppose that your application was written using MS Access, and you've 
got the database on a server somewhere, and users can open up their 
local copy of Access, and use the 'client' .mdb file that you've 
written.  Whenever they do a query on the database, they're basically 
reading the data from that server machine, and you're really only using 
the server as a disk server, as opposed to a true client-server 
relationship.  The server doesn't have to do much, but there's a lot of 
stuff flying around the network.

Now suppose that instead, you've got a server somewhere that's running 
an Oracle db, and users have client applications that display forms and 
query the database.  The server will do all the heavy processing 
(accessing the database to run queries), and will only transmit the 
results to the clients.  The server has to do a lot of work, but you're 
keeping your network traffic as low as possible by only sending what's 
required.

Matt Lewis