Open Data Protocol (OData)

Pablo CastroSoftware Architect

Microsoft

pablo.castro@microsoft.com

Industry Trends

• Data Silos -> Open Data– Impacts government, science and enterprise

• Web Sites -> Web APIs– Device/Language/Runtime proliferation

• On Premises -> Cloud– Includes shift to Web API’s– APIs need to support both on-premises and cloud

Data Sharing

• Effective data sharing is tricky– Avoid imposing how data should be accessed– Provide a uniform interface to all data– Maintain consistency & business logic rules– Semantics may come with data or added separately

• Enabling interoperability– Build on existing infrastructure

• HTTP, JSON, etc.

– Establish common patterns• Most data services need filters, sorting, paging, etc.

OData in 1 Slide

• Uniform way of representing structured data– Atom, JSON formats

• Uniform URL conventions– Navigation, filtering, sorting, paging, etc.

• Uniform operations– Addressability– GET, POST, PUT, DELETE always mean the same

• Keep the barrier of entry as low as possible

Using OData

• Server frameworks– WCF Data Services (.NET), odata4j (java), Ruby

• Client environments– Android, iOS, Windows Phone 7, HTML/JavaScript,

Silverlight, Java, PHP

• Products– Microsoft: SharePoint, Dynamics, Reporting Services, …– Other companies: IBM, SAP, WebNodes, Telerik, Tableau,

Pebble Reports, …

http://odata.org