Client Server

Introduction
In a competitive world it is necessary for organizations to take advantage of every opportunity to reduce cost, improve quality, and provide service. Most organizations today recognize the need to be market driven, to be competitive, and to demonstrate added value.
A strategy being adopted by many organizations is to flatten the management hierarchy. With the elimination of layers of middle management, the remaining individuals must be empowered to make the strategy successful. Information to support rational decision making must be made available to these individuals. Information technology (IT) is an effective vehicle to support the implementation of this strategy; frequently it is not used effectively. The client/server model provides power to the desktop, with information available to support the decision-making process and enable decision-making authority.
The Gartner Group, a team of computer industry analysts, noted a widening chasm between user expectations and the ability of information systems (IS) organizations to fulfill them. The gap has been fueled by dramatic increases in end-user comfort with technology (mainly because of prevalent PC literacy); continuous cost declines in pivotal hardware technologies; escalation in highly publicized vendor promises; increasing time delays between vendor promised releases and product delivery (that is, "vaporware"); and emergence of the graphical user in terface (GUI) as the perceived solution to all computing problems.
In this book you will see that client/server computing is the technology capable of bridging this chasm. This technology, particularly when integrated into the normal business process, can take advantage of this new literacy, cost-effective technology, and GUI friendliness. In conjunction with a well-architected systems development environment (SDE), it is possible for client/server computing to use the technology of today and be positioned to take advantage of vendor promises as...