Client/Server

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.^[1] 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.

Schematic clients-server interaction.

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. A notable example of this is the way OpenGL treats the video card of a computer as a server, with the actual application making rendering requests to it. This model is further solidified with the OpenGL Shading Language, with the user writing small programs that live in video memory, and are requested from the main program through the graphics driver.

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.

The interaction between client and server is often described using sequence diagrams. The Unified Modeling Language has support for sequence diagrams