April 2, 2003 - - Volume 2, Number 4

Putting The Client To Work
by Mark Altenbernd

Over the next several years, the nature of computing is going to change profoundly. Your computing client – your desktop machine or your portable – is going to be doing a great deal more computing than it has been. And as a result, you are going to be a great deal happier than you have been.

In the early 1980s, IBM introduced its Personal Computer, and computing began to change as PCs started showing up on desktops here and there. At first they handled ad hoc, stand-alone computing chores, using a word processor or perhaps a spreadsheet application. With the impressive amount of intelligence available in the PC, client-server applications became possible, with the single central server storing and retrieving data but the many desktop client machines contributing to the process by taking responsibility for formatting and displaying data.

In 1990, Microsoft introduced its Windows 3.0 operating system, thereby legitimizing the notion of graphical user interfaces that had begun years earlier at Xerox and had been continued with the Apple Macintosh. In addition to the attractive and helpful graphical appearance, Windows offered multi-tasking, the ability to perform numerous tasks concurrently, and integrated networking, which enabled communication among many computers and led to the mushrooming of client-server applications.

Just as we were starting to get good with multitasking operating systems and client-server applications, things changed again. While the Internet had been around for years, it was only in the mid-1990s that the Internet’s graphical component, the World Wide Web, came to prominence. The graphical interface was not as elaborate as the one we had become comfortable with in Windows and the Mac. Mostly what you saw on early versions of the Web was just text documents with perhaps a little bit of formatting applied – font size and color, for example – and maybe a picture or two. But you could get those documents from anywhere in the world. And you could exchange e-mail with anyone anywhere in the world.

The advent of the Web was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it brought some new features and capabilities that had never been available before. It was possible, for example, to distribute an application and its data globally, instantly and inexpensively. On the other hand, the Web is inherently stateless, meaning that it is very difficult to create and maintain anything resembling a persistent computing session. And the Web can be slow and unresponsive, requiring a large volume of network traffic, with most of the computing carried out on the single server while the many clients sit idly by, waiting for responses. The Web’s user experience does not compare at all well with that of a more traditional client-server application. Some people have even suggested that WWW really stands for “Worldwide Wait”.

And now just one more piece of history. In 1964, Gordon Moor, a co-founder of Intel, observed that the art and science of integrated circuitry was advancing so rapidly that the amount of data that could be stored on a silicon chip doubled about once every year. By the late 1970s, the rate of growth had slowed from once a year to about once every 18 months. It has remained at that level for about the last quarter-century, and Moore and others have suggested that it will remain at that level for at least another two decades.

Moore’s Law isn’t really a physical law; it’s just an observation of human endeavor. And it isn’t a precise predictor of the development of technology. Nevertheless it’s a pretty good indicator of how the power of desktop computers has grown over the years. Today’s representative desktop computers are as much as a thousand times faster than the original IBM PC. And there have been comparable increases in the other measures of computing power: RAM, disk space, display resolution, and so on. The typical desktop computer of today is far more powerful than the mainframe computers of 20 years ago.

Our increasing use of the Web has placed increasing demands on two already overburdened components: servers and the network. Meanwhile most of those powerful resources residing in desktop computers are just sitting around wasting away. While the power of the desktop computer has increased dramatically, the work that we have asked it to do has not.

Microsoft for several years has been pushing their .NET (pronounced “dot-net”) framework. It is an ambitious undertaking that will unfold over several years, and it involves significant technical changes that will affect the hundreds of thousands of software developers who create Windows-based applications and utilities.

About 10 months ago, Macromedia introduced a new version of its suite of tools. Dubbed MX (and I have no idea what MX means), there are as many as 7 separate tools that can be integrated and used to build Web Services and what Macromedia calls Rich Internet Applications. (Just for the record, those 7 tools are Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Freehand, Flash, Flash Remoting, Flash Communications Server, and Cold Fusion. And also just for the record, you also can build Web Services within the Microsoft .NET framework. The subject of Web Services is beyond the scope of this article, but we will deal with it in a future article.)

Rich Internet Applications are an attempt to improve the quality of the user experience of Internet applications. One way RIAs seek to achieve this goal is to provide a richer and more feature-laden graphical interface that will be comparable to that of client-server applications.

Another improvement that RIAs deliver is a far faster, more responsive application that eliminates the sometimes mind-numbing delays of the Internet. They achieve this end by moving an application and all of its data from the server to the client, resulting in a dramatic increase in use of the two most overburdened components in the system, the network infrastructure and the server. Network traffic is reduced dramatically, and the wasting computing power of the many clients is made to do useful work.

“Which of the two initiatives will win out, Microsoft’s .NET or Macromedia’s Rich Internet Applications?” I hear you asking. The answer is “Yes.” Both will succeed, in my opinion. While they can be seen as exclusive and competitive technologies, they also can be seen as coexisting and even co-operative approaches. Indeed Macromedia’s MX suite provides support for .NET development, that is, a Rich Internet Application can exist within the .NET framework. One advantage that Macromedia has is the fact that RIAs can be hosted on a wide variety of technology platforms, including Windows, Unix, and Linux.

For mine own part, I intend to continue working with the Macromedia toolset, in which I have made a pretty substantial investment over the past 6 or 7 years. And my own development environment will continue to be the Windows operating system. I believe that there are a large number of other developers who will follow this same path, as well.

So If you have a pretty powerful desktop or laptop computer that you fear may be overkill for the applications it is running, just hold on for a bit. Applications will begin to show up that take advantage of all that power, and you will begin to enjoy a much more pleasant computing experience.

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The evaluation and selection of applications for your business use is an important undertaking, one that you may not feel fully qualified to do on your own. Cheer up, we can help. Our Application Management Services are designed to help you come to grips with the issues of identifying your business needs, defining your software requirements, and finding the systems, applications, and utilities that are most appropriate for you. For assistance with finding the right mix of applications for your business, call us at (800) 557-7634. Or visit our Web site to learn more about how we can help you: http://www.Altenbernd.Com.
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