🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <LOWRY.92Oct6101439@rotor.watson.ibm.com>, lowry@watson.ibm.com (Andy Lowry) writes:
|> 
|> Woa!  I think we've got two very different ideas of what client-server
|> means floating around this discussion.  Jon Alperin appears to take
|> "Client-Server" to mean a way of configuring hardware: you have some
|> client machines, and you have some server machines, and the client
|> machines get services from the (you guessed it!) server machines.
|> It's a definition that will almost certainly become useless very
|> quickly, because the boundaries are hardly ever that strict.
|> 

If you ask 10 people to define client-server, you get 10++ different
answers.  I define client-server as a notion in which party A cooperates
with party B to give the illusion that all work is done by party A.
So in this context, party A is playing the role of a client, party B,
a server.  So, if this notion is applied to computing, a process running
somewhere in the network(or locally) provides a service that another
process needs to complete its task.  If the two hosts involved are
equally capable, they can switch the roles of C/S.  Then they are
in a peer-to-peer network.  So, peer-to-peer is not an antithema of
client-server, but rather refers to a network topology.
TCP/IP, for instance, is a peer-to-peer network, although C/S is the
predominant computing paradigm in it.  IBM SNA used to be a non P2P
because all nodes were organized in a hierarchical relationship, and
dictated the capabilities of each node.  What is the opposite of
C/S?  It's centralized, integrated computing.  You may argue that
I am looking at only one aspect, and I agree.  What is your definition?

-- 
Edward So,  Computing Systems, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
IBM VNET: EDSO at WATSON       Internet: edso@watson.ibm.com