Chapter 3 -- The Service API

Chapter 3

What separates a file server from an application server is the server's ability to safely and reliably run applications without the intervention of a user . While it is possible to run an application on a Microsoft Windows 98 workstation and make it available on a peer-to-peer network, this is not an ideal environment. Running an application on a real server allows the program to perform the work closer to the data and then allows that processing to be shared among many clients .

Certainly you could cobble together something on Windows 98 that looks and acts an awful lot like a server application. For instance, the Microsoft Database Engine (MSDE) can run on platforms ranging from Windows 95 to Windows 2000. In many respects, the functionality is the same on all of these platforms, and you might be tempted to consider the potential operating systems to be equals in terms of hosting applications. This would be a mistake.

Aside from the differences in threading and application partitioning, another big difference between the various 32-bit Windows platforms is the availability on Windows 2000 of the Service API, which I will discuss next .