Chapter 12: Clients, Servers and Broadband

Chapter 13: Bandwidth-on-Demand Networks a Solution to Peer-to-Peer File Sharing?

Chapter 14: A 3-D Visualisation and Telepresence Collaborative Working Environment

Chapter 15: A Virtual Studio Production Chain

Part Overview

This part outlines some of the issues relating to applications.

There have been great advances to the technologies used in homes. Digital computing, signal processing, communications, display technologies, etc, have all changed beyond recognition. Some of these changes have been described in preceding chapters.

However, technology alone will not change our lives; it is the applications that use the technology that will have most impact. Later on in this part, there are two chapters describing actual application technologies 3-D virtual presence that can transform person-to-person communication, and new technologies for creating multimedia content.

But before that, there are two chapters describing some of the fundamental architectural issues about how to distribute application functionality in a distributed system. These chapters consider applications of client/server and peer-to-peer computing architectures. In this introduction, these terms are defined and explained.

In the era BC (before computer-networks!) issues of distributing application functionality did not arise an application ran on a single computer. There was no other choice. For many of us, most of our computing experience lies in using PCs; very often PCs are not networked (especially in the home), or only limited use is made of the network. In most cases, an application runs entirely either on the...