
Microsoft's oData (Open Data Protocol) - drawkbox
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Mar-22.html
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viggity
I didn't really "get" why oData was cool until I watched the keynote about it
at MIX. They start getting into it around 61 minutes into the keynote

<http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/KEY02>

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fnid2
This seems like overkill really. Rest is just fine. If i have to look for 10
minutes to figure out how to share my data with oData, why bother? It's
available with REST already.

~~~
drawkbox
I agree, I think it is adding a layer that might be another layer that needs
tools to even use. REST is the way now. They are just trying to describe the
content in the REST transport. But I think we have that already with JSON,
JSONSchema, ATOM and others. Trying to write wrappers and descriptions too
specific or globally acceptable is what got us in trouble with Web Services
built on SOAP and bloated XML. This looks like it is more ontology focused
(OWL) but probably overkill.

~~~
fnid2
The SOAP tragedy was my first thought. In 2000, SOAP was just coming out and I
had written an XML to Javabean mapper based on reflection that was much more
lean and with much higher throughput than SOAP. At that time, Microsoft was
the biggest SOAP proponent and was pushing it very hard.

I thought it was bloated and unnecessarily complicated to integrate and
conform to, so we skipped on it. I suspect most will skip on oData too unless
it is simplified. It's an architect's abstract dream and I think some people
need to wake up.

I suspect the only people who will choose oData are the business managers
running budget legitimizing projects.

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gcampbell
The actual website for the protocol has recently been updated with a lot of
good information: <http://odata.org/>

