Microsoft's Client/Server Achitecture is a cost effective protocol to interconnect separate PC's providing a homogenous environment at a minimal cost.
Comp-U-Floor is a powerful, yet affordable, enterprise-wide, Microsoft’s Windows and SQL based, software system that supports your business sales, inventory, purchasing, warehousing, installations, imports and financial management needs.
Comp-U-Floor Client Server Architecture
The client/server software architecture is a versatile, message-based and modular infrastructure that is intended to improve usability, flexibility, interoperability, and scalability as compared to centralized, mainframe, time sharing computing.
A client is defined as a requester of services and a server is defined as the provider of services. A single machine can be both a client and a server depending on the software configuration. This technology description provides a summary of some common client/server architectures and, for completeness, also summarizes mainframe and file sharing architectures. Detailed descriptions for many of the individual architectures are provided elsewhere in the document. (Schussel 96, Edelstein 94).
Client Server vs. Mainframe
With mainframe software architectures all intelligence is within the central host computer. Users interact with the host through a terminal that captures keystrokes and sends that information to the host. Mainframe software architectures are not tied to a hardware platform. User interaction can be done using PCs and UNIX workstations. A limitation of mainframe software architectures is that they do not easily support graphical user interfaces or multiple databases from geographically dispersed sites.
Client/server architecture: As a result of the limitations of file sharing architectures used in main frames, the client/server architecture emerged. This approach introduced a database server to replace the file server. Using a relational database management system (RDBMS), user queries could be answered directly. The client/server architecture reduced network traffic by providing a query response rather than total file transfer. It improves multi-user updating through a GUI front end to a shared database. In client/server architectures, Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) or standard query language (SQL) statements are typically used to communicate between the client and server.
Usage Considerations
Client/server architectures are being used throughout industry and the military. They provide a versatile infrastructure that supports insertion of new technology more readily than earlier software designs.
Maturity
Client/server software architectures have been in use since the late 1980s. It is a solid widely used operating environment that provides growth at a minimal cost.
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