Views are one of the options you can use for your C/S app.
Other approaches are:
1. ADO (blah - there are better ways in VFP, but its just an option)
2. SPT (SQL Pass-through - using ANSI-SQL queries for retrieving data (to be server independant) and VFP DML (data-manipulating language) commands for better performance when making preprocessing of the data)
3. Combination of 1., 2. and views (maybe without 1. but not necessary)
specified... (maybe some other UT members will give other ideas)

Regards