Web developers can REST easy with OData

The NineStack team puts a lot of effort into all that they do whether it’s work or play. One of their major activities at this web application development agency in Porvorim, Goa is their Share-It sessions. NineStack’s Share It sessions not only help them to share information about processes that go into their work but also helps to break the monotony of the team’s daily routine. Their 17th Share It session was about OData Version4 and its usage and benefits for web developers in any typical web application development stack.

What is OData?

OData is an industry standard for accessing data. It has several technical aspects that need to be considered during web development. The .Net Developer that led this particular Share It session demonstrated the details of these technical aspects through examples as part of her explanation for the team.

Since OData is simply a standardized protocol it can be used to access data, or modify it from different data sources like web browsers, mobile apps, cloud storage and business intelligence tools. OData was originally initiated by Microsoft in 2007 through its first three versions. In its fourth version, it became standardized by the OASIS standards group in order to simplify data sharing across the various data sources.

In the absence of an OData like standard web developers have to write custom code to access data from these various data sources. This is time-consuming and inefficient. OData has taken away this problem by making the developer more efficient in writing a standardized code that is reused for access changes or variation across data sources.

Benefits of using OData

Ending the session, the .Net Developer summarized all of this into just four simple benefits which are listed below.

Focus on business logic

The main goal of OData is to write a query requesting for data just once which makes things easier for every web developer. In other words, if web developers in Goa write a query just once, they won’t need to keep doing it in order to access data or make modifications to it.

OData helps to place focus on business logic while building RESTful APIs or application program interfaces (API) that use HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. Representational state transfer (REST) technology is described as a type of architecture and approach to communications which is used in web development on a regular basis.

Performance and ease of use

As far as protocols go, OData is said to be very easy to use. Therefore, its performance is optimum where it interacts between the web client and service or query that is written.

Support for multiple types of data sources

OData provides a common way for clients to access different data sources. It also allows a web developer to write a service just once which in turn also allows different clients to use this same data in distinct ways.

All of NineStack’s Share It sessions are interactive as well as great sources of information for web developers in Goa and elsewhere. Check out the Nordic Intent blog for more articles like these.