The settling of the dotcom dust left technology vendors at something of a marketing cul-de-sac. Last year’s focus on the ‘front-end’ (user-facing technologies) has peaked now that everyone who is still a player has their e-route to market in place. Distributed computing has come to the vendors’ rescue. This article demystifies an ‘under the bonnet’ technology issue that will increasingly impinge on the legal sector.
What is meant by distributed computing?
Centralised – still using a dumb terminal? Then you have a centralised architecture. That is, all the processing is carried out on a central computer.
Decentralised – using PCs on the desk connected to some shared resources held on a server, for example a time recording database or a document management system? Then you have a client-server system. In other words, you have an environment where processing takes place on more than one computer. Decentralised or client-server can also be referred to as distributed computing.
N-Tier – the decentralised architecture we have just described could also be called two-tier because there are two platforms involved in the application, that of the user and of the server. N-tier is a generic term where ‘N’ equates to the number of platforms. So if you still have a centralised architecture you could proclaim to have a practice that is firmly underpinned by a one-tier architecture. This ploy may well work with other lawyers, but might cause uncontrolled fits of laughter if extolled in front of a technologist.
