What is the future of Smart Clients?

CS-> BS-> richclient-> smartclient

In traditional enterprise application development, CS is generally used. This development method features high data transmission efficiency and user interface friendliness, A large amount of user personalized information can be stored on the client. However, this method also has its disadvantages, that is, the application scope is too narrow and is generally limited to the enterprise LAN, in addition, a complete client must be installed on each terminal. Program When the client program version is changed, it is not convenient to reinstall each terminal.
Later, with the rapid development of Internet technology, BS's enterprise solutions emerged. in this solution, the application scope of the system has been extended to the entire Internet, and the use of the system has been greatly improved due to the implementation of zero clients. however, the BS system also has its inherent shortcomings, which both have poor performance and are not as convenient as the CS system, which hinders its development.
To solve the problem of BS system performance and ease of use, some enterprises have proposed the concept of rich client (richclient). One solution is to use JavaScript + HTC + webserver, there are some other solutions, but the results are similar. But this method does not fundamentally solve the performance problem of BS systems, but only improves some. In addition, the complexity of this development is amazing, the development efficiency is quite low and is not widely used.
In the past two or three years, the industry has proposed the concept of a smart client (smartclient). It integrates the advantages of CS and BS, and discards their shortcomings, good results have been achieved. the specific implementation of the Smart Client is as follows: the terminal runs a lightweight Client Program (generally only dozens of K), which is only the basic framework of the program and is loaded with various application modules; if the server has a new application module version, it is also responsible for automatic update and deployment, and data exchange with the server is generally performed using Web Services. because it runs on a client, its interface is similar to that of a common CS program. The CS program has advantages and is automatically deployed, all updates to each client are automatically completed even if the entire system changes. This is similar to the BS system. in addition, it generally uses Web Services to exchange data with servers, which determines that it is suitable for both LAN and WAN, as well as good scalability, and easier to achieve load balancing. the Smart Client also has an outstanding advantage, that is, it can be connected to the Internet at any time, that is, it can also execute most applications and save application data to the local device, after the application is online, the application data can be updated to the server. this makes it useful in smart devices. Imagine that you can place an order with your PDA on a train one day, and you can place an order at any time (If your pda can be connected to the Internet) or send the order to the server after going home.

The above is just my rough understanding of these systems, and I hope you will criticize and correct them more.