Introduction
In designing a client–server application, a decision is to be made as to which parts of the task should be executed on the client, and which on the server. This decision can crucially affect the cost of clients and servers, the robustness and security of the application as a whole, and the flexibility of the design to later modification or porting.
The characteristics of the user interface often force the decision on a designer. For instance, a drawing package could choose to download an initial image from a server and allow all edits to be made locally, returning the revised drawing to the server upon completion. This would require a thick client and might be characterised by a long time to start and stop (while a whole complex drawing was transferred) but quick to edit.
Conversely, a thin client could download just the visible parts of the drawing at the beginning and send each change back to the server to update the drawing. This might be characterised by a short start-up time, but a tediously slow editing process.
Read more about this topic: Fat Client
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