Obtaining and Configuring Centralized Computing

Although old, I still find the thin client (dumb terminal) technology fascinating

One of the departments where I work use Citrix Mataframe......it does have its pros. The computers are pretty average in performance specs. The computers could easily be replaced with older systems and still allow Citrix to run.

I think Sun Microsystems has a similar technology. The clients have a flat screen monitor with a card reader, a keyboard, and mouse. The user inserts his/her card into the card reader and his/her profile shows up on the client's monitor. Obviously, all the clients connect to a server. This was presented at a computer show I went to.

Nowadays, you dont see this technology very often.

You see it under different guises though. I'm working on a project right now that aims to replace a 'fat client' application with a central server farm and thin clients doing all their transactions via a web interface using Java. The big danger with this sort of stuff is that it moves the stress point - before when things ran slowly you'd look at the server or the client, but once you've done this then you have to consider the network much more closely as well because you've made everything the user does far more transactional

It's interesting that you brought up network issues in this kind of architecture, because not too long ago (two weeks ago at max) one of the departments at my work place (the department is located in another state, a few hours away) was having an ongoing problem with a web based program that they use. The application alone is complex, and we examined all the major components of the application to not find the solution......long story short, we increased the amount of bandwidth between us and them and the problem scope decreased significantly.

It's the transactional nature of the new way of working that's the key. For instance, say you have a thick client application on your PC that uses say Oracle forms to access a diatant database. All the screens the user sees as they move about through your application are generated locally and pretty snappily, any delays the user sees will just be short pauses while the data is fetched. During those pauses however the page is stable, and at worst they might see a few blank fields which take half a second to fill in with the numbers. Now move that to thin client where all the user has is a web browser that is accessing everything they see from a distant server and using Java to make it look good. Now every time the end user does something, moves from screen to screen, clicks on a button to do something then everything they see is coming down the wire. Think of how a poor internet connection feels and you'll see that from the user's point of view the network has just become just as critical as the server. Indeed they don't know which is which, they just know it isn't as 'snappy' as before and they don't like it. Experience tells me that unless the network is good you're only going to reap disappointnent going from thick client to thin