A thin client application development using OCL and conceptual schema

According to the client-server architecture, a thin client is a client program which relies heavily on the computing resources of the server. Current implementations include web-based applications that only have their graphical user interface displayed on a browser program, and the rest of the application run on back-end servers. Business rules, however, are normally parts of the application logic and are hard-coded as an integral part of the application program. Rules maintenance thus implies costly application program modifications. Also rules modifications could involve modifications of several programs that refer to the same rules. Thus makes application maintenance even more challenging. In fact, it has long been recognized that integrity constraints including business rules, as described by a conceptual schema, should be enforced by the database management system. This paper presents a combined Object Constraint Language (OCL) and Object Role Model (ORM) for integrity constraints modeling, and demonstrates an implementation which enforces them by using a commercially available DBMS.