Web Services-based Smart Client Data Synchronization

Along with the progress of corporate globalization,more and more companies set up branches around the world and makes informationalization more and more difficult.It is a great challenge to ensure efficient access to the enterprise's information system from worldwide branches.Although a B/S system is able to achieve centralized management of information,it lacks support for rich user interface or offline usage.In this context,Smart Clients have become a widely-accepted solution in recent years.With Smart Clients,offiine users also have access to fat client-side application with rich user interface.However Smart Clients require the client-side application to preserve data for offiine usage.In other word,developers need to take care of data synchronization between client and server.In this paper the author gives a,from high-level to detailed,step by step design analysis of the implementation of distributed database synchronization in Smart Clients.His past Smart Client project involving web-service-based distributed data synchronization will serve as an example.At first,this paper discusses the current status and methods of data synchronization technology,as well as gives an overall analysis of data synchronization of distributed database. Then it gives a general analysis of the technologies which lay the foundation of web-service-based data synchronization technology for Smart Client,which includes web service,Smart Client and ADO.NET.Then the paper gives a background introduction of the software project that utilizes the data synchronization technology.Then it presents the overall design of the web-service-based data synchronization,including its main functions and characteristics,system design and database design.Then it presents the detailed design of Web-service-based on the Smart Client data synchronization technology including its key process.Then it analyzes the practical effect of its application in software projects.At last,the paper summarizes the web-service-based Smart Client data synchronization technology,as well as provides discussion on the direction of research in the next step.