OData for iOS resources
Last week I had the pleasure of presenting on OData for the Atlanta iOS developers meetup. We had some great discussions (even a little bit about Windows Phone) and pizza afterwards. Below are many resources related to my talk.
Here’s the slide deck I presented:
For the basics of OData visit the https://OData.org website. You’ll find information on the protocol, as well as all the many producers, consumers and SDKs.
The OData client for Objective-C is a simple library for iOS developers. It abstracts tasks like forming the URIs with parameters, facilitates adding HTTP headers (including authentication) and deserializes the response into objects. It also includes odatagen which can read the metadata from an OData service and generate proxy classes. In this iteration, the OData client library is not integrated with Core Data, and is not inherently asychronous (but could be used in that way if desired). The team at Microsoft is always looking for feedback on the library, so please feel free to share feedback and engage in discussions through the links at the project home page.
https://odataprimer.com is a comprehensive wiki for learning and sharing about OData.
If you want a quick and dirty OData browser, to help in your development of your own app or just to see what an OData feed contains, download the OData Browser for iOS. The source code is available in github too.
Another good sample app is the PDC 2010 Odata feed browser. PDC (Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference) made their schedule data available via an OData feed, and someone in this community put together this app to browse the schedules. By the way, that conference featured a good session on OData - Creating Custom OData Services: Inside Some of the Top OData Services – dissecting how some of popular OData services were built with security and scalability in mind. (You’ll need Silverlight installed to enjoy that presentation).
For great overview on OData check out the keynote (below) from last year’s MIX conference. Skip to 59 minutes in if you want to jump straight to the OData talk.