client

/ˈklaiənt/

In ancient Rome, a client is an individual protected and sponsored by a patron.

A client state is a state that is economically, politically, or militarily subordinate to another more powerful state (termed controlling state in this article) in international relations.

A customer is someone who buys products or services from a company, while a client refers to a certain type of customer who purchases professional services from a business. Generally speaking, customers buy products while clients buy advice and solutions.

In computing, a client is a piece of computer hardware or software that accesses a service made available by a server as part of the client–server model of computer networks. The server is often (but not always) on another computer system, in which case the client accesses the service by way of a network. For example, web browsers are clients that connect to web servers and retrieve web pages for display. Email clients retrieve email from mail servers. Online chat uses a variety of clients, which vary on the chat protocol being used. Multiplayer video games or online video games may run as a client on each computer. The term "client" may also be applied to computers or devices that run the client software or users that use the client software.

A thick client, also known as a rich client or fat client, is a client that performs the bulk of any data processing operations itself, and does not necessarily rely on the server. The personal computer is a common example of a fat client, because of its relatively large set of features and capabilities and its light reliance upon a server.

A thin client is a minimal sort of client. Thin clients use the resources of the host computer. A thin client generally only presents processed data provided by an application server, which performs the bulk of any required data processing. A device using web application (such as Office Web Apps) is a thin client.

A hybrid client is a mixture of the above two client models. Similar to a fat client, it processes locally, but relies on the server for storing persistent data.

六级/考研单词: sponsor, patron, subordinate, potent, advice, compute, hardware, seldom, web, retrieve, offline, protocol, bulk, data, hybrid, persist