Language related -What does Client-server application mean?

Question

Well

It's not a big question, obviously.

But you see, an application that is using a database on the servers, and is installed on multiple clients. Is called Client/Server application.

And an application that is constituted by two parts: Host (or server) part, and the client part.

They are both called client/server apps

How can we distinguish them, and what's the proper name of each type.

P.S. I'm talking about English, you know. I want to say that this application is Client/Server(only database on server) and not a Client/Server(as real client and server).

Answer 1

It has to do with which side the request comes from (amongst other things): the Client issues a "request" and the Server responds.

The terminology Client-Server is often associated with a discipline called "System Design Engineering" (there are other attributions for sure but that's one).

Of course, an Agent could be composed of different sub-systems, each having different roles (i.e. S1 has a Client role whilst S2 has a Server role).

One should note that the terminology Client-Server can also be found outside of Computer Sciences. A good example is in the networking field: A Client protocol layer interfaces with a Server protocol layer e.g. IP (Client) uses the services of an Ethernet protocol layer (the Server in this case).

Answer 2

I don't think I could say it any better than Wikipedia:

Client-server computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or work loads between service providers (servers) and service requesters, called clients. Often clients and servers operate over a computer network on separate hardware. A server machine is a high-performance host that is running one or more server programs which share its 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 (listen to) incoming requests.

I am not sure what you are asking in the second part of your question - if both architectures involve clients making requests to servers, then they are both client-server architectures. On what basis would you prefer to distinguish them?

Answer 3

As others have said, they're both client/server applications. If you want to be more explicit about what kind of client and what kind of server, you can use adjectives or nouns. Please don't go inventing new terms when we've already got plenty of terms that can be combined - computer science & software engineering are already overloaded with unnecessary terms.

• web client/web server (note that the web includes more protocols than just HTTP)
• http client/http server
• ftp client/ftp server
• soap client/soap server

• client/application server (the app server may include a db, or the appserver may be the db client)
  
  

• database client/database server

• JDBC client/database server
• sqlplus/oracle
• application server/database server