Today's programs are focused on data sharing. Having a desktop, mobile, web, or server application is great, but they all need to be able to communicate with each other, and share data, if they want to be relevant in today's technology.
Microsoft formulated, and then released to the public, oData for sharing data. It is freely available for all platforms and is now being used to supply data from one source to another. From the website http://www.odata.org the following statement is taken:
The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a Web protocol for querying and updating data that provides a way to unlock your data and free it from silos that exist in applications today. OData does this by applying and building upon Web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) and JSON to provide access to information from a variety of applications, services, and stores. The protocol emerged from experiences implementing AtomPub clients and servers in a variety of products over the past several years. OData is being used to expose and access information from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, relational databases, file systems, content management systems and traditional Web sites.
In the past, we have only weakly embraced protocals for sharing data ( ie. XML, POP/SMTP, FTP ) and alternative data ( ie. SQL ). However, if we are to move forward in the next few years, our tools need to fully embrace SQL and oData with classes that make it as simple to use as it is in other development tools.
oData is available for Windows, iOS, and Android. It works with SQL, cloud servers, and common web languages. Many large corporations have embraced it and have data services available through oData.
I would encourage you to look at the website (http://www.odata.org) to learn more about it, and I would encourage the Five Tech community to supplement FiveWin with an oData class.
