Terms such as cloud computing, hosted desk tops, thin client and
fat clients are part of the concept that allows business people to access their computers from devices such as iPads and iPhones without being the office, explained Exocloud director Farrukh Choudhry.
Since the proposed patterns deal with functionality partition, we select patterns having the same purpose;
Fat Client (i.e.
"With traditional legacy or '
fat client' applications, the data was difficult to deploy, required significant maintenance on the back end, was not reusable, and there were various interoperability challenges with newer systems."
Since pilot testing 50 of the devices, he's added hundreds more and has drafted additional hundreds of aging "
fat clients"--Macs and PCs already in Hudson Falls' classrooms--for his thin client revolution.
In fact, XTT is not an IDE unto itself; rather it extends the capabilities of the leading Java IDEs (NetBeans, Eclipse, Sun Java Studio, and JBuilder); a patented communication 'tunnel' to and from the Java Client that uses XML over HTTP/HTTPS thereby avoiding the
fat client problems of RMI development; a set of visual forms that are compiled Java classes averaging approximately 10kb in size (prior to jar packaging); a development infrastructure that automates the "plumbing" responsible for data marshalling, selects, updates, inserts, deletes, as well as remote method calls (RMI) and web services - with XTT there is no custom coding required
IBM appears to be responding to Microsoft Corp's re-invention of
fat client computing, called today "rich client".
Portals are not limited to
fat client POS units and desktops, however.
I'm looking for a secure thin client platform to easily deliver high performing, feature-rich applications at a much lower total cost than
fat client Windows applications.
"It's a
fat client without the fat," said Capobianco.
Analysts, including David Smith at Gartner, maintain that two major influences - web services and peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies - will lead to a resurgence of the '
fat client', or as its supporters prefer to call it, the 'rich client'.
The suburban Chicago company has a
fat client list that includes the Union Pacific Railway, Burlington Northern-Santa Fe, CSX and Inland Steel, and some of that business may shift to Sudbury.
Development issues: Microsoft has invested a good deal of development effort into making Office a Web content-creation application, but Office 2000 remains a "
fat client" application that still requires serious bandwidth to run remotely.
