If you have not heard, Silverlight is the latest rich client technology from Microsoft. The good thing about it is that it works almost on all browsers and operating systems and you can host your application on non-microsoft stack too, but there are things such as database connectivity that you can't benefit from when creating Silverlight applications. The only way to create data-driven applications would be to use a service backend. Here I'll show you how to create a J2EE backend for your Silverlight application and host it on a JBoss application server.

 

We've been doing a lot of Java / .NET interop for last couple of years in our enterprise applications. On one hand, our customers used their existing expertise and infrastructure that worked better with Java based technologies like their existing Unix based servers, Sybase database (on Unix) and the knowledge of their DBA team, and we using our existing Java developers and expertise. But what Java based technology provides that we don't have on .NET world? Is it important at all?

 

There's a new kid on the block! An effort to port Java frameworks to .NET is not a new thing and it's been around since the early days of .NET 1, but integration of .NET Framework and Java Development Kit (JDK) is something I'm not used to see everyday! 

One thing we've learned the hard way when developing large scale applications, was to use incomparable existing functionalities in Java world! Things like Message Queues, Task Scheduling, Load Balancing and fail over, etc, and yes, that means connecting your .NET application to a Java application server on the backend. I've been working on a PoC for this on the last couple of weeks, so there'll be yet another enterprise comparison between what new EJB 3.0 and .NET can offer you. Stay tuned.