Network

A computer with minimal memory, disk storage and processor power designed to connect to a network, especially the Internet. The idea behind network computers is that many users who are connected to a network don't need all the computer power they get from a typical personal computer. Instead, they can rely on the power of the network servers.

Instead, they rely on a server to store data. Network computers take this idea one step further by also minimizing the amount of memory and processor power required by the workstation. Network computers designed to connect to the Internet are sometimes called Internet boxes, Net PCs, and Internet appliances.

One of the strongest arguments behind network computers is that they reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) -- not only because the machines themselves are less expensive than PCs, but also because network computers can be administered and updated from a central network server.

Solaris (operating system)

Solaris is a Unix-based operating system introduced by Sun Microsystems in 1992 as the successor to SunOS.

Solaris is known for its scalability, especially on SPARC systems, as well for being the origin for many innovative features such as DTrace and ZFS. Solaris supports SPARC-based and x86-based workstations and servers from Sun and other vendors, with efforts underway to port to additional platforms.

Solaris is certified against the Single Unix Specification. Although it was historically developed as proprietary software, it is supported on systems manufactured by all major server vendors, and the majority of its code base is now open source software via the Open Solaris project.

Web server

The term web server can mean one of two things:

1. A computer program that is responsible for accepting HTTP requests from clients (user agents such as web browsers), and serving them HTTP responses along with optional data contents, which usually are web pages such as HTML documents and linked objects (images, etc.).
2. A computer that runs a computer program as described above.

3. Logging: usually web servers have also the capability of logging some detailed information, about client requests and server responses, to log files; this allows the webmaster to collect statistics by running log analyzers on these files.

Application framework

In computer programming, an application framework is a software framework that is used to implement the standard structure of an application for a specific operating system. Application frameworks became popular with the rise of the graphical user interface (GUI), since these tended to promote a standard structure for applications. It is also much simpler to create automatic GUI creation tools when a standard framework is used, since the underlying code structure of the application is known in advance. Object-oriented programming techniques are usually used to implement frameworks such that the unique parts of an application can simply inherit from pre-existing classes in the framework.[citation needed]

One of the first commercial application frameworks was MacApp, written by Apple Computer for the Macintosh. Originally written in an extended (object-oriented) version of Pascal, it was later rewritten in C++. Other popular frameworks for the Mac include Metro works Power plant and MacZoop (all based on Carbon). A different approach to an application framework is Cocoa for Mac OS X. Free software frameworks exist as part of the Mozilla, Open Office.org, GNOME and KDE projects.