How would YOU write a client/server Java applet today?

Hi,

We have a requirement to develop a new GUI add-on for our system.  We have 
investigated doing this using CGI but HTML is simply not going to give us 
the same selection of components and rich interface that we need so we 
decided to create an applet using a Swing user interface (our target 
deployment already runs the Sun Plugin in their browser so we have all the 
javax classes).  I have done some testing and downloading the jt400 
classes as needed is not going to be a problem for us thanks to applet 
caching, etc.

My question to anyone who would care to give me some advice is - what 
would you use for database access?  We have a sort of bad taste from 
updating the database directly using JDBC from a previous project and 
would like to move to something else, perhaps stored procedures.  Is this 
the way to go?  If so, would you recommend SQL or External Stored 
procedures?  We have a requirement for accessing several files and 
possibly calling programs in the business logic of this applet.  (which 
sort of leans me toward External RPGLE stored procedures)

As far as I can tell, you can't update a resultset (using JDBC) that is 
created external stored procedures stored in db2/400, but you can do this 
with SQL stored procedures?  I haven't been able to find a lot of 
information on updating using stored procedures in this particular 
scenario on the web or the forums/newsgroups and am just trying to get a 
feel of what is best to do here.  Is updating a resultset considered a 
good idea when it is created from a stored procedure?

Thanks in advance.

Dean