just an asterisk

I’ve been asked the difference between an email application like Outlook and a web-based service like Gmail. The answer is simple: Outlook is a thick client and Gmail is a thin client. Not enough information? It’s understandable. Despite our daily interactions with both types of clients, few people outside of the IT world or related industries have a complete understanding of the situation. As always, Just an Asterisk is here to provide some insight (through thick and thin – ha).

Let’s start easy – why should you care? Chances are, when computers invaded your life in the 90s, you were given software like Word, Excel, Outlook, Windows, etc. Each new piece of software required an installation, copying the files to run the program and a ton of other stuff onto your machine. For example, MS Office came with fonts and templates, a little application for launching the individual programs, and a ton of other little files that curiously deposited themselves all over your PC. Moreover, when you filled your hard drive full of junk, your copy of Word ran more slowly, spell check took 10 minutes to complete and you would get crashes from time to time that made you compulsively save everything you wrote. This is a thick client. I’m making this sound terrible but bear with me – there are benefits of thick clients that we’ll discuss in a bit.

The web-based thin client was a way to do two things: 1. You could get to your program via the web. No installation was required. 2. You can save a lot of money (if you’re a big company) by not having every Tom, Dick and Harry installing stuff on their machines. It turned out that we (more often than not) were the problem with thick clients. We saved too much stuff. We installed too much crud. We ruined the once pristine environment of our machines and made installing software too difficult a task for the IT folk (with your photos, mp3s and their associated programs, there were just too many variables for things to behave predictably). The web provided a single and simple environment for the software, where the speed of our machines just didn’t matter.

The thin client works like this: Let’s use the example of Gmail. You decide that you want to open an email from Just an Asterisk with the newest post. You click on that email. The data is sent across the net to a fast server (a computer) which processes yours and hundreds of other’s requests in a queue. The server is very, very good at this. When it’s your turn, it grabs the fantastic prose from Just an Asterisk and sends that back to your browser (firefox, internet explorer, chrome etc). On your screen the email opens and you cry with joy (editorial license).

So now you may be thinking “Whoopee, let’s make everything web based’. Well in theory thin clients are fantastic. However, like any brilliant idea, there are some snags. First, the web is not always accessible. Remember when I said that thick clients weren’t all bad? Well try typing your next paper on an airplane. I imagine that you won’t have an internet connection and without one, no thin client apps.* Second, if you have an internet connection, is it fast enough to run some of your more data intensive applications? For example, if you are a photographer, you probably spend a great deal of time with applications like Adobe Photoshop. Although there are worthy thin client photo-editors out there, none of these can pack the punch of the desktop application. Too much data needs to be passed back and forth between the user and the machine. An internet connection will simply not have enough bandwidth (Bandwidth is like the width of a highway. Increasing the speed limit would be a decrease in Latency. These are two good techie words to understand.) Now that we know all of this, I can answer a question I received – if storing your attachments on Gmail will slow down your email. With your new understanding of thin vs thick clients, you’ve probably already worked it out, but the answer is not really. As I mentioned above, your stuff is located on Google’s servers (for better or for worse) and at any one moment, you are only dealing with the data you’ve asked for. On Outlook, this would be a different story. The 1000 attachments in your email would have an effect on every email you opened, as they are on your hard drive and could be contributing to your performance lag…

I’m sure that there is much, much more that we could cover on this subject, but this should be enough for now. We are moving in the direction of a higher number of thin clients, but the thick client has its place. Realistically, looking at the current trends for Google and others, I’m sure we’ll see a higher number of blends between the two. Understanding the difference will help you be savvier in the products you choose!

~ab

* This isn’t entirely true. Google Gears is a great example of a technology that is blurring the line between Thick and Thin clients. I’m sure I’ll write another post on this subject in the future.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Software, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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