hello,

Our company intend to develop a client-server web-based application in the .NET platform. Basically, it involves extensive access to a database by the server since different clients request data in order to do some graphical simulation.. however, in order not to overload the server with these calculations (which takes hours or even days to perform before generating the actual simulation based on these calculations), we want the client to perform these calculations instead of the server.. so the server can do something else other then wasting its time calculating.. my question is Is it possible to execute a webservice (in this case perform those calculations) on the client-side rather on the server-side in the .NET platform context? if so how?

Thanks for your help,
sam

By design, a web service is run on the web server. It's nothing more than a web application really. It's just that the files have a web service extension (ASMX). Unless all your clients are running a web service you can't do this. If you are greatly concerned with offloading the bulk of the work to the client (which it definately sounds like you are), I'd recommend looking into another technology. You need to create a client application or build something into your web application that can run at the client (Java?).

Peter
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Work smarter, not harder.

What i meant to say basically is to know whether it is possible to run a web service on the client side (or having it locally) instead of busying the server? since in our project we intend to keep the server as much as possible from processing any request which is not database-related.

thanks

By nature the web service runs on the web service server. It's a server based application. The client calls the web service. The only way to have anything run on the client it to write software that runs on the client (console application, java applet in the browser, etc).

It sounds like you need to write a client application that talks to the web service only to get data. Then the client application does all the heavy lifting involved with the calculations of your simulation.

Peter
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Work smarter, not harder.

Well its true. I am wondering if creating a virtual directoy (so it could give the impression as if it is running on the server) on the client's machine and placing the webservice there and then executing it will solve this problem.. so the client will have the webservice locally instead of being on the server.

thanks
sam

That would work, but that would require that the client's machine be configured the same as your main web server. Does every client who would be using this application have IIS on their machine? Are the clients all on the same network as the database server so that the multiple occurances of the web services can talk with it?

You seem to be over complicating this situation. It would be much easier to just create a client app that talks with the single web service for data and then does it's own calculations.

Peter
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Work smarter, not harder.

Oh, maybe you need a cluster of servers, on design a distributed system to manage more than one computer.
web-service is only a kind of one-to-multi link or trans-data mode, in fact yu can do any thing if you can let multi-computer work together.