If you were to combine the capabilities of SQL, ODBC, XQuery and REST, stir it up, it might come out like OData. OData has been around for a long time now, and lives as an open systems project that has been widely used by Dot Net and other tools. However, it is not a Microsoft only toolset.
Looking much like a RESTful API in the underpinnings, it has a number of other verbs or functions for doing relational like things such as joins, filters, ordering, etc. If you are not familiar with OData you can read more at www.odata.org.
So, now we have yet another technique for communication with data sources, primarily driven by the Microsoft stack. Currently supported we have ADO.Net, WCF, Entity Framework, and OData. I’m wondering if OData is maybe not getting enough visibility.
One thing I like about OData is that from a consumer perspective it wouldn’t matter if you were using java, Java Script or just about any other programming language to consume the results. All you need is a library capable of talking to a web server,and handling JSON data. It can’t get much simpler than that.
Are you using OData today? Is it already obsolete? How does it compare in your mind to Web API? Share your ideas here or by email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben