Workshop

equire that the application files themselves be transferred to your computer’s memory.
Likewise, if you want to search the contents of a file while using file and print networking, you must load
the entire file over the network and then use a program at your end to do the actual search. Sort of
inefficient, huh?
Just as a point of interest—and as a confession to Geeks Anonymous—I once measured how much network
traffic loading the workstation files for a version of WordPerfect caused: about 4MB. Yikes!
In truth, some file and print database programs can identify and ask for slices of files (or records), but they
still need to comb through these slices—no matter how much of an index the program has—in order to find
data for you.
Client/Server Computing
In contrast, client/server computing depends on the server having more intelligence than the simple ability
to lump the file onto the network conveyor belt and shove it off to you. As we discussed in Hour 12,
“UNIX Networking Basics,” client/server systems can answer specific pricing questions about a catalog of
items, for example. Rather than shoving the catalog in your face the way a file and print server might do, a
client/server system would listen politely to your inquiry about widget pricing, perform a lookup on its
local database, and then send the response back to you, as illustrated in Figure 18.1.
Figure 18.1 You can think of client/server computing as two intelligent people sitting on two ends of the
phone. The client is the one asking the questions, and the server is the one providing the answers.
What else can a client/server system do? Well, take your Web browser for starters. It’s the client of a
client/server relationship. Your client says, “Hey, give me your default Web page,” and the server spits it
out at the client. (We’ll look at this more later in the chapter.)
In addition, client/server is what you’re using to submit information to a Yahoo search. If you use X
Window, thin client, or Java applications, you’re using client/server on the bottom line. Of course, the
programming on the server end can be rather complex and demanding on the server. (I’m not really going
to get deep into this, but it helps to know that—whatever the buzzword involved—any socket-level