SAS/CONNECT User's Guide

Introduction

The benefits of client/server applications are proven and many. The primary benefits include providing access to all of the resources on your network as well as maximizing the use of these resources. However, as client/server processing has been adopted and implemented by the business community, additional requirements have emerged.

In today's complex business world, tasks are best accomplished by a series of programs that work together as an application to produce a result. These programs can be spread across multiple computing environments that may or may not be homogeneous.

However, one requirement remains the same whether all of the programs that comprise an application run on a single processor, or each program runs on a separate heterogeneous processor: programs must communicate with each other in order to accomplish the goal of the application. The message facility that is available in SAS software can address all of these needs by using a flexible method of data exchange through messages.

This chapter describes the direct-messaging concept and introduces the messaging services that have been added to SAS to allow you to easily write applications that can communicate with each other on a single processor or across a network. You can develop "thin" client applications that talk to "fat" servers. You can implement applications that perform parallel processing and load balancing.

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