Portfolio
Early approaches to Distributed Applications
Source: George Schussel Published: Jan 1996
George Schussel provides a short discussion of the following approaches to computing architectures:
(1) Mainframe architecture: 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.
(2) File-sharing architecture: The original PC networks were based on file sharing architectures, where the server downloads files from the shared location to the desktop environment. File sharing architectures work if shared usage is low, update contention is low, and the volume of data to be transferred is low.
(3) Client/server approaches: PCs are now being used in client/server architectures. This approach introduced a database server to replace the file server. Using a relational database system (RDBS), user queries could be answered directly. The client/server architecture reduced network traffic by providing a query response rather than total file transfer. It improved multi-user updating through a GUI front end to a shared database. In client/server architectures, Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) or standard query language (SQL) statements are typically used to communicate between the client and the server.
