Is Citrix required for XML driven system?

[zan2006]

We are currently moving our Microsoft Visual Basic system to Microsoft .NET based on an all purpose XML message driven system. Many of our clients currently heavily rely on Citrix for publishing our application to their various remote locations across the WAN. My question is, if we move entirely to an XML driven system based on Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services do you think there would be a need to continue to publish our application to remote sites using Citrix? The application will be a smart client, and it will communicate to an application server using purely XML messages. Does anyone out there have experience with such Microsoft .NET applications that use XML entirely? If so have you done any tests to see the data bandwith used by XML messages - becuase really at the end of the day Citrix is manily used as its economical with the bandwidth. So if in the new system XML is economical with the bandwidth then Citrix does not need to be a requirement but just an option. Knowing some clients they would prefer to not use Citrix due to cost and maintenance overheads.

Any information, and indeed a debate/discussion on this would be of great help from you IT experts out there.

 

[ascotta]

I think you may be misunderstanding the XML part of Citrix here. The XML service transmits messages from Data Store to Citrix Servers and clients with information abouot applications and vice versa.

The only applcation data that goes to the client once the session is eestablished is keyboard mouse and video which goes via TCP/IP. that is what makes its bandwidth useage low.

I may be wrong but I would envisgae that DotNet apps will still consume considerably more bandwidth than Citrix.

[blue] A perspective from the other side!![/blue]

Cheers
Scott

 

[zan2006]

Hi Scout,

I fully understand the Citrix concept. My point is, and it seems that you have given your valued opinion, is whether it is believed that the bandwith used by using Citrix is less than or equal to not using Citrix for this XML message driven system. I guess the only way to find out is to carry out a test of using this system with Citrix and then without Citrix and in both cases carrying out a monitor on the bandwith.

If however there is anyone out there that may have carried out such a test using one of their XML message driven systems, would very much be interested to hear about it - as it seems to be quite an interesting debate.

Thanks