Silverlight and J2EE

Question

Hi All,

I am currently experimenting with silverlight for the first time and I am interested to know if there any frameworks which can help utilize a J2EE backend.

I have read online that silverlight supports socket connections which seems very interesting given the nature of the applications I am building. Does anyone know of any reason why it would not be possible to connect a silverlight client to a j2ee back over sockets.

Additionally if any one could give me and example of applications doing just this that would be appreciated.

Karl

Answer 1

As far as I know there´s nothing in the JEE specification such as row socket. It depends on your jee implementation. Tomcat (only a web container) has for example a Commet connector that you can use to hold a non blocking connection to your Silverlight client.

Another way to implement it is having you own server implementation that acts as a proxy ) between your Silverlight and the JEE Container (perhaps calling EJB). I have an application running with this architecture but using Adobe Flash instead of Silverlight

Answer 2

WCF is the preferred way to communicate back from Silverlight...

At server tier; your WCF host can communicate to J2EE backend; http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700845.aspx is the landing page of .NET/J2EE Interop; the page even has a sample application showing WCF wrapper around IBM WebSphere Trade 6.1.