Silverlight 4 UI and Java middle/services tier

What are the challenges? Is it similar to开发者_StackOverflow社区 consuming WCF services?

I have seen this post already.

I am really looking for challenges developers face while implementing it. Does it affect development time/cost?

It is quite similar to consuming WCF services. The most important thing is to have a properly designed service contract between the Silverlight client and the Java server. What you need is a Java service exposing its functionality via SOAP or REST(XML or JSON). This can be achieved by a Web Service framework such as Apache CXF. On the client side you would probably need to implement some logic to track data changes via INotifyPropertyChange and INotifyCollectionChanged. I've integrated Java backends with Silverlight several times. I don't think that it affects development time/cost very much cause it is straight forward.