For many corporations, administrative information systems are the backbone of their business activities. The purpose of this article is to introduce an application framework for small and medium-sized corporations for the problem domain of administrative information systems. The framework has a long and successful history and was implemented on several environments over two decades. The latest version is based on the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition. In this article, we will present the underlying theoretical principles of the framework as well as key sections of the framework’s design which reflect them. Furthermore, since the concept of frameworks has a number of appealing benefits, as well as challenges, we will summarize our experiences and address potential problems.