Clients and Servers
By Felipe Lodi
Document Editors are available for many tasks. In the past they were used just for the exercise of typing, saving and printing. Lately, the latter functionally, though yet present, has been giving place to publishing in many different ways. Such extended functionality makes possible to publish multimedia content directly from the editor to countless destinations.
Amongst services that are ready to receive multimedia content from editors are Twitter, Blogger, Google Plus, Facebook and most known email services on the Web. Whereas not every editor will have out-of-the-box integration with such services, APIs and SDKs are available for development and customization. (Facebook, 2012) Current versions of Microsoft Office and Windows Live suite enable easy publishing of multimedia content as Blog Posts. A feature that is embedded and accepts some of the well-known blog services on the Internet.
This introduced connectivity with the Internet and available Applications as Services make Document Editors client of many servers. Yet about Microsoft Word and its capabilities, the current version optionally “sends” the multimedia content, which can be just an image and its descriptive text, to SkyDrive, Microsoft SharePoint and it can publishes as Blog Post. Hence one client, three servers.
There are in fact many ways of Blogging nowadays. For recording and publishing to the world a group of thoughts, the candidate author just need a Mobile Phone actually. Even though it might be difficult to type too many attractive words on it, it is technically possible. Using a computer or maybe a tablet, the author would be more comfortable but regardless, he/she would also use the very same concepts of the Client-Server architecture presented in all these examples.
Such architecture achieves a great level of scalability and compatibility as multimedia content generated in Microsoft Word (the client) can be published online on Blogger from Google (the server) and again be retrieved in another editor on the Mobile Phone for example (another client) and again be saved to another Blog Service on the Web (another server). What do we have here? Should we change the architecture definition to Client(s)-Server(s) then?
I am very optimistic since we are experiencing good compatibility and exchange of data between different vendors and platforms. I can see small limitations though when developing complex multimedia content that might require video and audio to be streamed from another Source. Back to the example of the Blog Authoring, even though Microsoft Word would satisfy most of the expectations for deployment, a proper tool such as the Windows Live Writer (Microsoft, 2012) has options from attaching external content from YouTube to the post. This is again great evidence of connectivity and compatibility between concurrent corporations.
REFERENCES LIST
Facebook, 2012. SDKs. [Online] Available at: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/sdks/ [Accessed 28 July 2012].
Microsoft, 2012. Windows Live Essentials: Other Programs. [Online] Available at: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-live/essentials-other-programs [Accessed 28 July 2012].














