Software trends in client server computing?

Answer 1

In order to stay abreast of the new trends in Client-Server, we must start by looking at what is happening in the software trends as a whole. In the 1960s and 1970s was the era of centralized computing, with IBM mainframe occupied over 70% of the world's computer business. Throughout the 1980s, many functions once performed by the omnipresent IBM behemoths were systematically taken over by PCs. The result of this gravitational shift toward personal computers makes two significant remarks on the computer industry:

The PC shift made corporations to reset their IT organizations in a number of ways. We are currently in the Client-Server phase of the software development and will eventually move towards the truly distributed computing environment. In IT manager's point of view: distributed computing can be used as a tool for business process reengineering, corporate right-sizing, and customer responsiveness. The new software developments can be characterized as follows:

- Distributed: The main operating force in the software industry is the drive toward distributed computing, currently in its Client-Server phase.

- Multiphased transition: Client-Server is merely an intermediate step toward distribution. The ultimate goal is collaborative computing based on peer-to-peer networks.

- Enabling technologies: Prominent supporting technologies are object-oriented components, document-centric software architectures, data warehouse technology, standards, and the end-user programming trend.

On the other hand all the above software developments cannot afford to become set in its ways and without taking considerations or meeting the business needs as follows:

- Isolated desktop software solutions are no longer sufficient. The software industry must respond to consumer demand for portable, interoperable, distributed software solutions or else becomes extinct like their mainframe-only predecessors.

- Open Systems for Computing: the pressure on software vendors to establish interoperable, distributed, easy-for-end-user-programmers-to-use tools and standards upon which enterprise-wide architectures can be built.

-Business process reengineering increased consumer expectation, and networked distributed hardware, as well as numerous second-order complications are driving software complexity through the roof.

The software industry will, out of necessity, respond to the above pressures by forming forums, consortia, and back-room alliances in order to establish market-leading architectural infrastructure standards, interfaces, and middleware for the express purpose of shifting the balance of power in favour.