Client (computing)
A client is a computer system that accesses a (remote) service on another computer by some kind of network. The term was first applied to devices that were not capable of running their own stand-alone programs, but could interact with remote computers via a network. These dumb terminals were clients of the time-sharing mainframe computer.
The client-server model is still used today on the Internet, where a user may connect to a service operating on a remote system through the internet protocol suite. Web browsers are clients that connect to web servers and retrieve web pages for display. Most people use e-mail clients to retrieve their e-mail from their internet service provider's mail storage servers. Online chat uses a variety of clients, which vary depending on the chat protocol being used.
Increasingly, existing large client applications are being switched to websites, making the browser a sort of universal client. This avoids the hassle of downloading a large piece of software onto any computer you want to use the application on. An example of this is the rise of webmail.
Types of client
Clients are generally classified as either "fat clients", "thin clients", or "hybrid clients".
| Local storage | Local processing | |
|---|---|---|
| Thin Client | No | No |
| Hybrid Client | No | Yes |
| Fat Client | Yes | Yes |
Fat clients
A fat client (also known as a thick client or rich client) is a client that performs the bulk of any data processing operations itself, but does not necessarily rely on the server. The fat client is most common in the form of a personal computer, as the PC can operate independently.
Thin clients
A thin client is a minimal sort of client. Thin clients use the resources of the host computer. A thin client's job is generally just to graphically display pictures provided by an application server, which performs the bulk of any required data processing.
Hybrid clients
A hybrid client is a mixture of the above. Similar to fat client, it is processing locally, but rely on the server for the storage. This relatively new approach offers features from both the fat client(multimedia support, high performance) and the thin client (high manageability, flexibility).