Local and LAN vs. Local, LAN and WAN

Local – Personal Computer / Workstation installation for single-user software products.  The installation is not intended for more than one standalone computer.

LAN – Local Area Network: A computer network that is usually confined to a single building or group of building that spans a small area.

WAN – Wide Area Network: A computer network that spans a relatively large geographical area. Typically, WAN consists of two or more LANs  Computers connected to a wide-area network are often connected through public networks such as the telephone system. They can also be connected through leased lines or satellites.  The largest existing WAN is the Internet.

Kform Project Manager versions prior to 2007 were designed for standalone or LAN use.  Earlier version could be accessed remotely via VPN or third part software.  However, these versions were created with a two-tier architecture and remote usage results were not as stable and robust as desired.

To make the presentation layer extendable in Kform Project Manager 2007, every (user interface) UI component in the application is communicating with the web services using a data access wrapper class. The purpose of this wrapper class is getting data from the UI components in the form of parameters including SQL queries written at the form level and keeping all the intermediate layers transparent to the traffic coming in from the network.

For the connectivity between the presentation layer and the web service a configurable XML file (or layer) is utilized. This file contains the computer name and the name of the shared folder where the web services DLL is being hosted from which is using the Internet Information Server (IIS).