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It's a floor wax. No, it's a dessert topping. Floor wax! Dessert topping!
If this shtick sounds familiar, you're either a fan of old "Saturday Night Live" episodes or you've just been shopping for a client/server computing solution.
One of the most overused and least defined buzz phrases in the industry, "client/server" is applied to everything from spreadsheets to databases to GUIs to, well, floor wax. But what does it really mean? And are there any standards that define just what a client/server solution encompasses?
As it turns out, client/server computing has no strict definition. Talk to 10 analysts and you'll get at least 11 different descriptions. Some say client/server is a subset of a broader class of distributed processing applications; some say client/server distributed processing.
Vendors are even worse: Just about anything that runs on a LAN is called "client/server" these days.
But almost everyone agrees that client/server computing will be a critical component of nearly every corporate information system in the future.
"Eventually, every application will be client/server," predicts Tom Kucharsky, president of Summit Strategies Inc., in Boston. Summit helps companies develop marketing positions for client/server applications--programs that Kucharsky says are distinguished at least in part by distribution of processing tasks among multiple client and server PCs, though he cautions against strict definitions in this time of rapidly changing technology.
"Customers are confused because [client/server computing] is not well defined," agrees Alan Parnass, president of Mozart Systems Corp., a Burlingame, Calif., firm that sells both interface building tools and integration services.
WHY CLIENT/SERVER? Client/server computing is the inevitable outcome of putting processing power in people's desktop computers--combined with the multitude of powerful PC servers deployed throughout corporate LANs. Together, these powerful computers offer tremendous horsepower to process new classes of personal and workgroup productivity applications.
As end-users get more and more computing power, it's simply wasteful not to...