3.5 Enterprise Information System Clients

Enterprise information system clients access enterprise information system resources directly and assume responsibility for enforcing the business rules of the application.

Enterprise information system clients can use the JDBC API to access relational databases. A future release of the J2EE specification will describe standard ways to implement enterprise information system clients with connectors to non-relational resources, such as mainframe or enterprise resource planning systems.

These programs should be implemented with caution, since they access the database directly. Widely distributing such programs can also cause security problems.

Enterprise information system clients must both manage their user interface and enforce business rules. Fully functional applications designed this way tend to be complex. These programs should be limited to administration or management tasks, where the user interface is small or nonexistent and the task is simple and well understood.

For example, a stand-alone enterprise information system client could perform maintenance on database tables, and be invoked every night through an external mechanism.

The J2EE programming models doesn't recommend techniques for implementing these programs.