Core Java™ 2 Volume II - Advanced Features, Seventh Edition

The Roles of Client and Server

Let's go back to that idea of locally collecting information on a client computer and sending the information across a network to a server. We are supposing that a user on a local machine will fill out an information request form. The data is sent to the vendor's server. The server processes the request and will, in turn, want to send back product information the client can view, as shown in Figure 5-1.

Figure 5-1. Transmitting objects between client and server

In the traditional client/server model, the client translates the request to an intermediary transmission format and sends the request data to the server. ...