Cyrus : a new way of distributing programs

Abstract

The computing networking era began with the Mainframe model. Everything was centralized and dependent on a large, multi-user server which stored all the organizational data, and carried out all the processing tasks. End users communicated with the mainframe via dumb terminals, which were low cost devices with very poor user interfaces. The entire network model could be managed, monitored and maintained from the central mainframe. Distributed system started to gain popularity when mainframes were being replaced by smaller servers spread throughout the organization. The benefits of employing such distributed systems over centralized systems are mainly for better resource sharing, computational speedup due to executing several tasks concurrently and having an optimized load balancing, a more reliable and scalable network. Cyrus aims to prove the concept of providing application services remotely to re questers in a terminal emulation manner and taking advantage of the client/ server model system in a TCP/IP environment. Cyrus features a set of tools, including a scripting language, which allow the programmer to develop console applications that distribute their services to their requesters. These requesters are TCP/IP connected clients that make use of a typical Windows application in order to work with these applications remotely.