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In the face of decreasing IT expenditures, CIOs and IT Managers seek for solutions that provide realistic and dramatic cost-saving. In October, Gartner Analyst Peter Sondergaard stated that "The next big thing in IT is cost reduction, risk management and compliance,” As cost-saving became a major topic in the past couple of months, IT professionals give costs even more weight when making IT related decisions. New and even ongoing projects are being evaluated more carefully than before for their ROI and more cost-efficient technologies are sought for.

One rising technology that contributes to saving IT costs is the 'empty client'. As opposed to fat client and even thin client, this approach moves all logic and processing back to the server while leaving the client empty. This architecture allows the creation of advanced web UIs while investing only around 10% of the effort using other frameworks. The unprecedented web development efficiency is possible due to server based technology which enables unique web design advantages and productivity.

The empty client architecture enables the utilization of productive server based desktop methodologies. As a result, development can be narrowed down into a single development layer and contributes to improved productivity, as well as decreased amount of programming languages to be familiar with. The Visual WebGui framework is an example for applying this approach in the real world. Based on the empty client architecture it is capable of providing the intuitive WinForms designer for developing complex ASP.NET application.

The empty client architecture also allows an efficient migration of legacy applications to the web. Since the architecture uses desktop technologies it is possible to take an existing desktop application and port it to the Web without the need to rewrite. Therefore, migrating WinForms or VB6 applications can be done fairly simple and extremely fast while it is also possible to upgrading existing ASP.NET applications in a similar form.

This effortless migration capability, correlates to the ability to create several variations of the same source code without having to make hardly any modifications. In the real world, this facilitates organizations to run their application in a number of environments or modes, whereas the cost remains the same. For example, an application can run in desktop or web modes using the same source code, or alternatively, run in DHTML, Silverlight or WPF presentation layers. Basically, it allows additional presentation layers at no cost and with no additional development time.

Considerable savings on security costs is another major advantage of the empty client architecture. As can be implied from its name, the client uses this architecture remains empty at all time, since all of the application logic, UI logic and data access is handled on the server. Therefore, the client never consumes data or services directly but simply connects to the “view” on the server, via a standard protected HTTP/HTTPS pipeline, and then projected on the browser.

As decreasing IT expenditures is relevant now more than ever, the empty client becomes even a more attractive solution to developing organizational applications. The architecture presents many advantages in the area of performance and productivity, but more importantly nowadays, it provides significant cuts in IT cost that cannot be overlooked by IT Professionals.

This article was published on IT-Director.com