- published: 27 Jan 2015
- views: 9697
The client/server model is a computing model that acts as distributed application which partitions tasks or workloads between the providers of a resource or service, called servers, and service requesters, called clients. Often clients and servers communicate over a computer network on separate hardware, but both client and server may reside in the same system. A server machine is a host that is running one or more server programs which share their resources with clients. A client does not share any of its resources, but requests a server's content or service function. Clients therefore initiate communication sessions with servers which await incoming requests.
The client/server characteristic describes the relationship of cooperating programs in an application. The server component provides a function or service to one or many clients, which initiate requests for such services.
Functions such as email exchange, web access and database access are built on the client/server model. Users accessing banking services from their computer use a web browser client to send a request to a web server at a bank. That program may in turn forward the request to its own database client program, which sends a request to a database server at another bank computer to retrieve the account information. The balance is returned to the bank database client, which in turn serves it back to the web browser client, displaying the results to the user. The client–server model has become one of the central ideas of network computing. Many business applications being written today use the client–server model, as do the Internet's main application protocols, such as HTTP, SMTP, Telnet, and DNS.