Saturday 20 July 2013

Basics: Architecture of Modern Client Applications

We can no longer imagine a day without an app running on one of the electronic devices that we hold in our hands. Developers are actively creating apps for different purposes. May it be social media, weather report, news, stock market, even on quotes of your favourite philosopher and many others! So there are good numbers of chances that new people getting into programming turn into app developers. In this post, we will take a look at the architecture of client applications in general and a common question that I usually get from developers.

We have different kinds of client applications available these days. Following are some examples of client applications:

  • Apps that run on smart phones like iPhone, Android, Windows phone or any such device
  • Windows 8 Store apps
  • Applications like Google talk, Yahoo messenger, MetroTwit that run on any OS

Any kind of application must have two basic components: UI and Data. In context of modern client applications, they work as follows:

  • UI of modern client applications is rendered completely on the client’s device, because of which the user gets very rich experience
  • The app can use data stored in the device or it may fetch data with help of services that are hosted on a server. These services are responsible to connect to database and operate on the data

Following is a pictorial representation of the above points:




A common question:

Developers often get a question on accessing data from client applications when they are new to this model of development. The question is, “Why can’t we use data access technologies like ADO.NET or Entity Framework directly in the app?”

This question arises due to lack of understanding of the architecture. If you look at the above figure, it is quite clear that the data resides on a remote server to which the device can contact using network. It is important to note that the database cannot be directly accessible from any other device on the network. So, there has to be an accessible layer between the database and the application. This layer is service. The service has to be hosted at a place that has permissions to perform required operations on the database.

Since database is not accessible directly, there is no point in supporting use of database APIs in such applications.

Happy coding!

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