Building a Collaborative Client-Server Application

This paper explores the issues and the techniques of enabling multimedia applications for the thin client computing. A technique for enhancing viewing capabilities of Web-based clients, called the Superior Plug-in Module (SPM), is proposed. By utilizing the collaborative client-server architecture, jobs are shifted from thin clients to a supporting server, thus reducing the computing overhead required by the clients. The supporting server performs transcoding operations while acting as a proxy at the same time, thus alleviating loads of the Web-based clients. Also note that it is not necessary to install additional software modules on clients equipped with the SPM, when new document types are introduced. This feature results in great benefits for the SPM technique over typical ones. Since there do exist some tradeoffs between the complexity, the efficiency and the scalability of this technique, two alternative scenarios simulating different real situations are constructed. Experimental studies conducted in the two scenarios show promising results of this work.