Gurus, This is the gist of a problem encountered by an esteemed colleague -
We are looking for know how and experience concerning Java and browser applications running under Citrix Metaframe / Windows Terminal Server. One of our key customers in Hamburg has just started to provide GUI functionality for over 10 000 users using Windows Terminal Servers and dumb Citrix terminals (ICA). We understand that this is a proven approach for typical Windows applications like MS Office. Based on documenentation from Citrix we assume that a server with 2 CPUs and 2 GB of RAM should be suffient for about 50 active user sessions that work with MS Office and share a single 2MBit WAN connection. The customer has also choosen Java as strategic platform for all new application developments. Their current Java project uses a client with a Swing GUI that talks to a WebSphere application server. Now they encountered a problem with this Java client in combination with deployment on Windows Terminal Servers: Each user that starts the application requires a new instance of the VM (IBM JRE 1.3.1) with 60 to 70 MB of physical RAM. So Java applications will not scale well in terms of memory requirements on a Windows Terminal Server. We are also concerned about the Swing GUI, because Swing does not rely on the Windows GUI Widgets (like AWT or SWT) but instead implements its own widgets using low-level drawing primitives. Does that mean that a Swing application running on a Windows Terminal Server will require more processing ressources than a SWT application or a Visual Basic application? Will the use of Swing also increase the network load between the Citrix terminals and the Windows terminal server? We are now considering a browser GUI as alternative solution for this scenario: The Java application server generates HTML for web browsers running on the Windows Terminal Server. This approach should solve the memory problem. Does a browser-based GUI scale similar to a MS Office application in terms of required network bandwidth and processing power under a Windows Terminal Server? Any insights you can provide on using Java applications in combination with Windows Terminal Servers will be greatly appreaciated. regards, Derrick Okundaye ____________________________________________________ To change your JDJList options, please visit: http://www.sys-con.com/java/list.cfm Be respectful! Clean up your posts before replying ____________________________________________________
