... just use Terminal Services or similar, surely?

Alan Bourke asked "... just use Terminal Services or similar, surely?"

Err, well sometimes yes, sometimes no. It all depends on your application.

Some applications and environments work well with it, but for others it's a hell of a sledgehammer. If the application does a lot of user interaction then it can swallow more bandwidth than a decently written client-server app would do. On the other hand, if some d***head has written an app that slurps the database across to the client for local processing then it can help someone out of the hole they dug for themselves.

Of course there is the minor trivial detail that Terminal Services is a Windows thing - believe it or not, there is life outside of planet Windows ! While there are similar capabilities in other systems (X is common across most of the non Windows world) it still means having clients install and configure what may be an unfamiliar environment.

Far better to do the job right in the first place !