New Stuff in the OData World on CodePlex

If you are really into the Open Data Protocol (OData) and WCF Data Services (and you should be), there are a few cool new projects that just went up on CodePlex.

WCF Data Services Toolkit

This toolkit makes it easier to expose even more types of existing data as OData feeds. See this blog post by LostInTangent (aka. Jonathan Carter) about the new toolkit. Perhaps even better than the toolkit, there are three most excellent whitepapers that have also been published in this project (I’ve known that these were coming and have been waiting for them to go live):

• Building Real-World OData Services – this includes some great info that we (frankly) don’t do a great job in the core docs, such as: caching, concurrency, and non-standard addressing.
• Developing OData Services With SQL Azure And Entity Framework – the title is pretty self-explanatory.
• Building OData Services On Top Of Existing APIs – this is basically the details about the WCF Data Services Toolkit.

We’ve asked them to also republish these whitepapers somewhere on MSDN, so that folks can find them via search (and then I can link to them too).

datajs - JavaScript Library for data-centric web applications

This is a new cross-browser JaveScript library that targets OData services. For example, you can access the Genres feed in the Netflix service by making the following call.

OData.read("https://odata.netflix.com/v1/Catalog/Genres", function (data, response)
{
    //success handler
});

You can read more about it in this blog post.

Cheers,

Glenn Gailey