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| Ignite clients come in several different flavors, each with various capabilities. |
| link:SQL/JDBC/jdbc-driver[JDBC] and link:SQL/ODBC/odbc-driver[ODBC] drivers |
| are useful for SQL-only applications and SQL-based tools. Thick and thin clients go beyond SQL capabilities and |
| support many more APIs. Finally, ORM frameworks like Spring Data or Hibernate are also integrated with Ignite and |
| can be used as an access point to your cluster. |
| |
| Let's review the difference between thick and thin clients by comparing their capabilities. |
| |
| *Thick* clients (client nodes) join the cluster via an internal protocol, receive all of the cluster-wide |
| updates such as topology changes, are aware of data distribution, and can direct a query/operation to a server node |
| that owns a required data set. Plus, thick clients support all of the Ignite APIs. |
| |
| *Thin* clients (aka. lightweight clients) connect to the cluster via binary protocol with a well-defined |
| message format. This type of client supports a limited set of APIs (presently, key-value and SQL operations only) but |
| in return: |
| |
| - Makes it easy to enable programming language support for Ignite. Java, .NET, C++, Python, Node.JS, and |
| PHP are supported out of the box. |
| |
| - Doesn't have any dependencies on JVM. For instance, .NET and C++ _thick_ clients have a richer feature set but |
| start and use JVM internally. |
| |
| - Requires at least one port opened on the cluster end. Note that more ports need to be opened if |
| partition-awareness is used for a thin client. |
| |
| TIP: The ODBC driver uses a protocol similar to the thin client's. As for the JDBC driver, it comes in two flavors - |
| a thick version of the driver that utilizes a Java thick client internally and a thin counterpart, based on the thin |
| client's protocol. |
