What is a client?
A client is a device that acesses a service made available by a server.Followings are some of the examples of network client:
- A laptop
- Desktop PC running an operating system
- Imac running MacOS
- Apple or Android phone running different o/s
Let's see how we can represent a client with a symbol:
In internet word a client is used to send a request to a server. For example: when you open a chrome in your laptop and type google.com.
Your laptop i.e. client sends a request to google server and google respond with html data which then send to your chrome browser.
Your browser parses this html response recieved from the server and display a web page i.e. website. Now that we understood what client is let's learn what is a server.
What is a server?
A server is a device that provides functions or services for the clients.
let's understand how client and servers are defined in a network. Let say you have two computer connected together. Computer A sends a request to send image to Computer B.
In this case computer A wants a service and computer B provides the service i.e. image therefore you can say that computer A is acting as a client and computer B acts as a server.
it is also possible that same device can be a client in some situations, and a server in other situation.