STONE@SUMEX-AIM.STANFORD.EDU (Jeffrey Stone) (03/20/88)
A few questions about the deployment of NeWS applications in the
future:
1. With workstations gaining computational power rapidly (e.g.
through RISC developments), in the future will most use of
NeWS be in situations where the server and client both run
on the same computer, generally a workstation? I believe
that is the case today. Is it expected to change significantly
in the next few years?
2. Is there likely to be growing interest in low-priced NeWS
Servers (diskless PCs or Macs running a NeWS server
application) networked to powerful multi-user computers which
perform computation for many users? I have difficulty seeing
this as a generally interesting configuration for technical
applications except in those relatively few cases where
supercomputer power is required.
3. Does anyone see interest in more business-oriented applica-
tions (e.g financial workstations) with low-priced NeWS
terminals networked to multi-user client systems?
4. In cases where a single computer serves as the client for a
number of NeWS terminals, will application developers want to
add special features to their applications to optimize for the
multi-user environment? In the commercial world, we have
examples of this in things like CICS which is, among other
things, an efficient multi-terminal handler running in a multi-
user operating system. I know this is a long way from the
NeWS world, but are there things applications may want to do
to take advantage of the multi-user environment?
5. When a user runs an application where the client and the
server share the same physical system (workstation), does the
overhead of client-server communication add much computa-
tional load compared to non-distributed architectures? In
other words, is NeWS an appropriate architecture when user
interface and computation are both run on a workstation?
I will appreciate your responses.
Jeffrey Stone
Menlo Park, CA
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