Client-server computing architecture: an efficient paradigm for project management

There has been a tremendous push for world wide competition in recent years and, as such, the financial and economics sectors are gearing towards globalization for balancing traditional centralized corporate control. This trend has forced the business community to adopt new techniques for increasing productivity at lower operating costs. This has given birth to a new concept of re-engineering where the corporate-wide work-flow processes are redesigned instead of simply automating the processes within their organizations. This is exactly what is proposed in client-server computing. A client, in fact, is an application program which runs using local computing resources and at the some time can make a request for database or other network services from another remote application residing on server. The client is typically a PC workstation connected via a network to more powerful PCs, workstations, even mainframe or minicomputers usually known as servers. These are capable of handling requests from more than one client simultaneously. Here, the authors present the various advantages and disadvantages followed by applications of client-server computing models.