A worked case study

For yucks, I am going to work through a trivial design alternative in two directions to see how this progresses. The problem to be solved is a simple lookup where the user enters a term and the system responds with a definition or some other static text associated with the term. There are two alternative architectures to be explored. The first is a standard pc app type where everything would be loaded onto a personal computer. The second is a web app using a client server pattern. I am interested in seeing how the progressive elaboration of the client server pattern evolves as I drill down to the lower levels of design. I will be taking this much further than a typical architecture design since after specifying the client-server pattern, an architecture design would probably only go one level further down unless there were a quality sought that could not be assured at that level.

So the first cut is to recognize the client-server pattern. There is a client module, a server module and a relationship which is the internet. The next cut will be to provide specification to each of those pieces.