JCO Client Service 
The JCO client service is the Portal Runtime (PRT) service that provides JCO clientsto iViews. For the Enterprise Portal (EP) 5.0 it is the recommended method for obtaining JCO client support in iViews. For EP 6.0 it is recommended to use the SAP Connector Framework (JCA 1.0) or webservices to implement backend connections. However, the JCO client service is available in EP 6.0 and is backward compatible. Beginning with EP 6.0.2.3 the JCO client service supports shared JCO repositories. The shared JCO repository is shared among Portal users and is assigned to one backend. The usage of shared repositories reduces the resource consumption of an application significantly.
This document reflects the functionality of the JCO client service as of EP 5.0.4.0 and EP 6.0.4.0. This tutorial does not describe business cases of JCO, calling function modules with JCO or setting input and output parameters. Such information can be found in the SAP JCO documentation provided with the SAP JCO package.
Related Topics
JCO Client Service API. Published on SAP SDN
SAP Enterprise Portal: Administration Guide: System Landscape
SAP Enterprise Portal: Administration Guide: User Management
SAP JCO documentation provided as part of the JCO package
The JCO client service provides the following features:
· JCO clients are created with the user information obtained from the Portal component request. The iView developer does not have to care about user management.
· JCO clients can be used more than once, for example, they can be passed from one iView to another using the pool. This improves performance and reduces the resource consumption because the connection only needs to be established once.
· The pool keeps track of the JCO clients in use and disconnects them if there is an HTTP session timeout.
· The number of connections to a destination can be limited per user.
· Clients in the pool can be released if not used for a longer period of time to keep the number of unused connections low.