7.1 What Is Thin Client?

Acucorp's thin client technology is an innovation that lets you display the user interface portion of your server-based application on Windows graphical display hosts.

Acucorp's thin client technology is designed for two main purposes:

• To allow ACUCOBOL-GT programs running on a UNIX or Windows server to present a full Windows graphical user interface (GUI) on PCs networked with TCP/IP. To present a graphical user interface, the application screens require conversion to graphical, if they have not been converted already. Character-based user interfaces are also supported, with some restrictions. In either case, your application stays in one piece on the UNIX or Windows server.

• To allow both UNIX and Windows users to enjoy the benefits of centralized application maintenance and to adopt the performance characteristics of a "thin" architecture, reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO). Many applications perform better when deployed in a thin fashion compared to other networking techniques such as remote file access ("fat clients") or distributed processing. This is because thin client configurations execute COBOL programs on the server where data access is local.

Although designed for local and wide-area TCP/IP networks, Acucorp's thin client solution is well-suited to low-bandwidth, high-lag connections like the Internet because it eliminates the file I/O occurring over the network. The concept for deploying thin client in a local network is the same as it is for deploying thin client on the Internet.