Client–server computing architecture
Gurdeep S. Hura, Mukesh Singhal · 2001
There has been a tremendous push for worldwide competition in recent years, and financial and economic sectors are gearing toward globalization for balancing the traditional centralized corporate control. This trend has forced the business community to adopt new techniques for increasing productivity at lower operating costs. This has given birth to a new concept of re-engineering , where the corporate-wide work-flow processes are redesigned instead of simply automating the processes within their organizations. The use of emerging technologies is being used to fulfill the performance and productivity targets and goals of corporate re-engineering. Large corporations usually make decisions for any future expansion or strategy based on the data stored in central databases or files residing on mainframes or mini-computers. The off-loading of processing and manipulation of data from these expensive mini-computers and mainframes should be accomplished on cheaper workstations that offer access to the host machine. This is exactly what is proposed in client-server computing. A client is an application program which runs using local computing resources and at the same time can make a request for a database or other network service from another remote application residing on the server . The software offering interaction between clients and servers is usually termed “middleware.” The client is typically a PC workstation connected via a network to more powerful PCs, workstations, or even a mainframe or minicomputers usually known as servers. These are capable of handling requests from more than one client simultaneously.