When creating Line of Business (LoB) applications with Silverlight, the only choice to get the data to the application is through webservices. People having their Silverlight application hosted on the same webserver as the service have almost no problem, but things get interesting when service is not hosted on the same machine as the application, and it gets hairy when you self-host a WCF service. Let's see how it is done in each scenario.

 

In previous post, we saw how easy it is to use J2EE as a rich backend. Let's continue with our example and show how to fetch and send some data from our J2EE backend to a Silverlight rich client application.

 

When working on a Silverlight application that recieved data from a WebService I notice that loading of an array of 1500 items takes a lot of time. With this problem, application launch that has 3 separate webservice lookups, took almost 5 minutes to complete.

 

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.

 

I started checking out the new Silverlight 4 Beta this week and the most important feature (for me) added to this release : FlowDirection. If you’re not a WPF guy, this is the equivalent of RightToLeft in WinForm world, just recently added to Silverlight. If this works the way the same feature in WPF works, all custom controls built in this platform will automagically have correct RightToLeft behavior, “Almost” without any additional code from component vendor / developer. Sounds too good to be true, but it is.