Build an enterprise application for a customer with aprox. 100 Clients ???

[gicio]

Build an enterprise application for a customer with aprox. 100 Clients ???

 

HI!!!

 

If you would happen to get the chance to build an enterprise application

for a customer with aprox. 100 Clients (�and increasing) which technology

and architecture would you choose. The security policy is pretty strong

so we would have actually only port 80 available. Besides that no deployment

effort on client side is desirable. There is a 100Mbit LAN and this new

application would be deployed on the intranet (internal network).

The GUI of this application should be very rich and fast like win32 applications.

What would you propose in order to fulfil those requirements.

 

It is an enterprise app� so inputing data, printing invoices,

packing lists, reporting, etc

Clients are win xp machines It processes data on the server mainly,

the presentation is on the clients Data is stored in a database

100Mbit has to do with the access speed to the backbone resources

from clients.(only port 80)

 

Any hints, links and ideas will be highly appreciated

 

 

 

Regards,

 

 

 

gicio

[mocella]

Sounds like the poster-child for a smart-client (href-exe, url-execute, whatever-the-heck-they-call-it-these-days) opportunity.

 

The basic idea here is you develop your rich client as a win-forms application, but when you're done developing, you can just plot the .exe/.dll files onto a web-server and point to that file (http:\\localhost\someapp\runapp.exe) through the browser, and your win-form app will launch.

 

There's some requirements though - like having the framework installed on your server (1.1 is more geared towards this as 1.0 was much more locked down and restrictive in some of the settings needed for this type of app).

 

Another issue you'll probably face is code-access security restrictions, since your app will run by default in the Internet security zone, which is probably less than ideal. You can get around this by creating a caspol script to trust your app to whatever level you require. See this link for some info on that (although he has the "-pp" statements backwards in his example):

http://weblogs.asp.net/mreynolds/archive/2003/07/11/9975.aspx

 

Read up on smart-client here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/using/deploying/smartclient/default.aspx

[Nerseus]

I'd suggest getting port 443 open in addition to 80. If you plan on using webservices AND you want it secure, then you're looking at SSL which usually uses port 443 (I think).

 

I'd say "use .NET and SQL Server" but that's a given :)

If you want details, that would mean multiple architecture documents describing network communication, server setups, etc.

 

-ner

[Derek Stone]

If by "clients" you mean "nodes on the network" then you're going to want to manage them with a package such as Microsoft's Systems Management Server (SMS).