You can’t keep track of the whole world, so every now and then I bump into something and think “boy I wish I had known about this years ago”.
The OData (Open Data Protocol) standard by Microsoft is such a thing. It allows to communicate data over the internet in a RESTful way using either JSON or AtomPub based XML, standardized by OASIS who has it’s roots in the SGML world (SGML is one of the predecessors of XML).
There is a rich Ecosystem of implementations in many platforms (including .NET, Delphi, Java, PHP, JavaScript, etc) with public reachable Example Services to test with (not surprising there is a NorthWind service).
Here are a few links of stuff I want to dig deeper into it to grasp it better: Read the rest of this entry »





