Scenario 7:
Distributed Internet Applications

Sally G. Ceiling is a successful businesswoman who for over a year has been doing her investing online, but there are things she does not like about it. Because her broker uses a typical thin-client web-based system, all processing is done on their server. This means that in order to take advantage of their financial analysis features, Sally must provide them with all her personal financial information. In addition, interaction over the Web is somewhat clunky, and she cannot customize the interface to suit her needs. Her broker's web site does not offer multi-stock analysis or multi-value analysis, something that Sally wants, so she manually transfers data into a spreadsheet on her own computer to do the analysis. This is time consuming and error prone.

Sally was especially frustrated when she decided to invest in some commodities. Her current broker does not handle commodities trading, so she had to find another online broker who did. Now she has to supply yet another company with her personal financial information. This new company also provides analysis features, but they are confusingly different than those provided by her stock broker, and the user interfaces to the two sites are completely different, making it difficult to switch between them.

Now, Sally finds out about SecureTrade, a Spin-based product. The SecureTrade client runs on her own computer, not on some remote server, so she never has to provide her personal financial data to anyone. SecureTrade connects to multiple servers on the Internet to obtain prices and information on stocks and other investments. She can receive real-time data from two different markets, through two different Internet servers, and analyze the performance of multiple investments, all on one graph.

SecureTrade includes a full-featured spreadsheet component, so Sally can even perform any analysis she wishes, without copying data manually to a spreadsheet. She can still buy and sell stocks through her existing broker, or other online brokers. SecureTrade will even calculate which online broker will cost the least for a specific trade. Sally is now making better investments, in less time, all without divulging any personal financial information.

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