More on that redesign issue I brought up last month

Given:
A client-server application, using a proprietary communication protocol, with a Java client talking to a primarily ILE server (with a few external calls to OPM MI). There's a facility for adding user-defined fields to the database, and there are exit hooks built into the server allowing us to:

1. Propagate data from this application to other applications as needed.

2. Propagate data within the application's own database, so that (for example) related user-defined fields will automatically track each other.

3. Enforce business rules on what any given user can DO, based on who the user is, whether the user is authorized to a particular record, and under what circumstances the user is accessing the record.

4. Enforce business rules on what any given user can SEE, based on who the user is, whether the user is authorized to a particular record, and under what circumstances the user is accessing the record.

As I said earlier, there has been some talk about re-architecting the application to do away with the proprietary server in favor of a JDBC connection to the database. But that raises questions of:

1. How would we be able to do this without losing some or all of what we currently do through exit programs?

2. Without a proprietary server, how would we control license validation?

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JHHL