Concepts Of Client and Server

To put it simply, this is about the relationship between two computers: yours and the server. Client stuff happens on your computer and Server stuff happens on the server. However, although the Client stuff runs on your computer, it's still stored on the server. Make sense? Let's explore it in a bit more detail.

Who's Who 

The terms Client and Server are used in Web development contexts. As with all tech terms, these are often used as a concise reference, but are unfortunately also often used when another term would actually be easier to understand. For whatever reason, a lot of geeks seem to love using mystifying language, perhaps to compensate for their crippling social inadequacies (and I include myself in that category) - who knows?

Anyway, Client and Server are fairly easy to get to grips with. They simply refer to where the different functions of a website are run. Server refers (as you might have guessed) to code etc that is executed on the Web server, and Client refers to things that happen within the browser (e.g. Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, Chrome) as it runs on your computer.

The Network

The terms Client and Server are used to reflect the relationship within the computer network (i.e. the Internet). However, you don't need to understand the ins and outs of networking to understand these terms.

The Process

When you browse to a website, a number of things happen. The data and programming code etc for the site are stored on the Web server. The website address identifies the location of the server, and the browser requests the relevant page from this location.

The Web browser receives the HTML content from the server, which it is able to interpret and display as a Web page, together with the text, images, data etc and style rules determining how it should be displayed.

A wide variety of technologies are used in Web development, some running on the server, and some on the client. Your Web browser is basically able to display HTML, but this HTML may be served to it in different ways.

Models

The traditional Web model meant storing HTML pages on the server which are simply sent to the browser and displayed. In this model, the content of a site was all directly written into the HTML files, and had to be manually changed if the information needed changed. However, as sites developed, there became more of a focus on data-driven sites that are said to be 'dynamic'. This simply means that the sites use data and other resources to build the Web pages at the time that they are requested by a browser.

Server side programming is one of the main tools involved in this. Server side languages such as ASP and PHP run on Web servers, creating HTML when they run and sending it to the requesting browser to be displayed. In a typical model, the Web server will have a database on it, plus the other content such as images etc. When someone requests a page, the Server side scripts execute, query the database for any relevant information and write this back to the browser in the form of the HTML page.

Client side programming refers to functionality that is carried out within the browser itself. Many sites try to be interactive in different ways, and one such way is using a Client side language such as JavaScript. This is typically used to achieve things like interactive menus and styles that make the elements in a site change their appearance as you interact with them using your mouse and keyboard - these are generally carried out using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

With the emerging techniques in HTML5 and CSS3, websites are becoming even more responsive, interactive and dynamic from both client and server side.

Client and Server Working Together

Some uses of Web technology use the two approaches of client side and server side development in tandem, such as AJAX, as well as many jQuery and HTML5 functions. You'll see examples of these on lots of sites, where an element of the page is updated without the page as a whole being refreshed. In this case a Client side script in JavaScript often sends a request to a server side script (e.g. in PHP), with the returned data displayed in the browser without it having to request a new page. With HTML5, the client side code doesn't even have to request something from the server, the sever can simply push new data for the browser to display.

Usage

If you see someone referring to Client Server Applications or Client Server Development etc, this is really just a reference to the use of a variety of technologies deployed both on the Server and Client. These days, Web development pretty much always involves both so the terms are often redundant. Some developers do specialise and focus on one side or the other, particularly where large Web applications are involved.

Relevance

If you are planning to get involved in Web development yourself, it is vital to understand the process that executes when people view websites. However, if you are only planning on accessing the Web as an end-user, you really don't have to understand these concepts, although they are interesting if you're an utter geek like me.