In computing, a client is a piece of computer hardware or software that accesses a service made available by a server as part of the client-server model of computer networks). A client is any computer hardware or software device that requests access to a service provided by a server. Clients are typically seen as the requesting program or user in a client-server architecture. Clients interact with servers by making requests for data or resources that the client is not capable of providing. Clients and servers can be located in different areas and connect via a network. They can also be located on the same machine and connect by interprocess communications.
Examples of clients include web browsers that connect to web servers and retrieve web pages for display, email clients that retrieve email from mail servers, and online chat clients that use a variety of clients depending on the chat protocol being used). Multiplayer video games or online video games may run as a client on each computer).
There are different types of clients, including thick clients that provide a majority of resources and data processing and rely only lightly on a server, and thin clients that rely heavily on a server for resources and to perform most of the data processing.
In summary, a client is a computer or software program that accesses a service made available by a server as part of the client-server model of computer networks. Clients interact with servers by making requests for data or resources that the client is not capable of providing.
