Can push technology be applied to thin client and explain the answer?

Answer 1

Not to give a difficult answer, but both no and yes.

"Push" technology, put simply, is data sent to a client, and received by, without being requested by the client), push

By defiinition, a thin client is a display station only (although there are thin client functions available working within stand-alone computing devices or even browser windows). All computing is done, again by definition, on the server.

For all intents and purposes, however, most thin clients are used to as PC's (from display to CPU and memory) to users, and are capable of running most contemporary operating systems and applications. The biggest concern is with rich media (i.e.: video) and other data-intensive applicaitons in which network bandwidth and latency become an issue.

That having been said, if your server is capable of pushing data, and the client environment (OS) and application (from browser to email to custom applications) can deal with asynchronous updates (i.e.: "push", or data received without being requested by the client), push technology as a whole will work.

If the question is whether thin clients not running as "slaves" to VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Solaris, Linux, etc... can receive asynchronous updates, I would rephrase the question, as the answer is, "No, thin clients can not receive USER generated push updates".

As a rule, bare-client updates would be vendor-specific (if even possible), and would effect only a relatively small group of vendor- and implementation-specific client settings, and would not incorporate user data.

Hope this helps.