Submitted by “Microsoft is putting some meat on the bones of its plan to make information that’s stuck in databases reachable with the same standards used to retrieve Web pages. At its Mix conference this week, Microsoft touted an interface called the Open Data Protocol, or OData. Specifically, the company announced an OData software developer kit to let programmers more easily use it and said it wants to standardize OData. What fortuitous timing. Microsoft listed the Internet Engineering Task Force and World Wide Web Constortium as groups where it would like to see this standardization, and the latter of these two has new management eager to tackle new projects.”
Head -> Desk.
SPARQL, YAML, and the ‘Linked Data’ thing Tim Berners-Lee is doing is already doing this.
Anything from Microsoft with Open in the name should be examined from a safe distance. The PHP SDK is over-engineered and built around .NET, Azure and the databases are provided in MSSQL. for IIS or Visual Studio.
Urgh.
Looking at this closer, it looks like one giant arse Trojan horse to get numpty developers hooked on MS systems for another 10 years. _Everything_ is geared around every single Microsoft technology. MS servers, MS DBs, Silverlight, .NET, Azure, the list just goes on.
The protocol itself should be implementable free from Microsoft technologies, but then I don’t rate the protocol either and Microsoft are relying that as the focal point, their site will swerve developers away from those nasty, not very official free-software implementations.
Microsoft + web = fail.
Just take a closer look on the projects they had actually failed at … that’s a boat load of crap.
Since when it focussing on a single-vendor toolchain a bad thing?
You buy loads and loads of Apple stuff. Double standards much?
People here tend to ignore anything from Microsoft, they just screw here and there.
Apple says its Mac O$ X is the most advanced OS, so why my Tiger still haven’t got JDK 6? Java is about cross-platform, and Apple breaks that by forcing user to upgrade to the crappy new *slow* leopard to get JDK 6 (which is free on Windows/ Linux).
People here simply ignore the fact that vendors like Microsoft want to provide tools to attract developers to use its own technologies, it is business strategy.
Silly boy, Tiger is too busy playing golf and cheating on his wife!!
(Mac OS 10.4 is over 4 years old and pretty much EOL when it comes to “Apple” support.)
Bullcrap. Switching to Mac taught me more about open source than twice as many years using Windows.
I use PHP / MySQL / Apache and other tools that are all available on any platform.
Apple don’t _sell_ [software] a web server, a database server, an IDE. These things are free and the technologies are portable.
It took me years to get off of the Microsoft ecosystem because it’s completely importable; and I was just using IIS/ASP and Access. That’s nothing compared to what Microsoft is _promoting_ with the OData SDKs.
Sure, but that’s because Apple can’t earn any money there. Now look at where Apple cAN earn money.
iTunes? Closed, and Apple is aggressively trying to keep it as such. It only runs on Mac, and sort-of “runs” on Windows. Very open indeed.
iPhone? Well, we know the story here. Not only is Apple trying to put people in jail who jailbreak their device, the development toolchain is entirely locked into the Mac world. You need a Mac to develop for the iPhone.
Same for the iPad.
So, I ask you again: double standards much?
The iPhone came and soured Apple’s image.
Mac OS X != iPhone OS X. Mac OS X is the best quality desktop OS with the best quality software. Mac OS X has made my software portable and I could move to Linux easily, but I choose not to because Linux lacks polish that irritates me and distracts from getting work done.
Mac OS X is still an awesome desktop OS that promotes open software, formats and interoperability.
I don’t own an iPhone, won’t own one and the same goes for iPad.
Um.. so you define “works absolutely fine on a daily basis” as “sort of”?? I’m confused… I run iTunes every day on my work PC. I tried Songbird once, but it just didn’t work as well for me.
You need a Mac because it uses the tools that Apple have under Mac OS X to create the App bundle. The tool chain isn’t “locked” to Apple. In fact, you can build a perfectly usable command line toolchain from source. The issue is more than the User Interface pretty much REQUIRES Interface Builder and the iPhone Simulator, and those are Mac apps. There in lies your problem. But then, I don’t see Microsoft porting their .Net CF tools and emulator, or even Silverlight development kit Mac or Linux either.
“Bullcrap. Switching to Mac taught me more about open source than twice as many years using Windows.”
maybe thats because you didn’t know where to look.
http://www.codeplex.com/
While OSX technically has more OSS at its core and used throughout the OS, it does not have more pre compiled binaries of OSS software. Sure you can compile most POSIX complient software against OSX and it will work (to some degree anyways), but the fact is that a lot of the open source software on OSX has only started to mature in the last 3-4 years (which if i had to guess is around the time when you switched).
That being said, while apple may have more OSS in the OS Apple itself is less open. MS is just as open (personally i think more so these last 4 years) than Apple (yes i know how that sounds and it was even weird typing that, but its looking to be the case).
Example: If i want ot see the source code to MS’s mobile platform I can; http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/default.mspx
if i wanted to see the source code to Apple’s mobile platform I would probably be shot on site.
Each company has had lock in practices for their products. the difference is that MS is moving ot a more transparent development process and community involvement, while Apple is still trying ot rule with an iron fist and keep development tightly closed up.
Windows 7 beta’s and RC’s were free downloads to the comunity and MS listeneed to feedback and improved the OS accourding to what the customers wanted.
Apple on the other hand, well lets just say they are less open to what the customer wants. infact apple practically TELLS the customer what they want, creating a supply and then demanding the users conform to it. it is evident in their hardware refreshes and OS releases (matted screen options missing etc).
….i could keep going on but I think the point has been made. That all said, I love my Mac, and my windows box (and my QNX box, solaris, PC-BSD, etc…). Each has their strengths and weaknesses. But you can’t blindly back 1 platform and compare all it’s strengths against all the competitors weaknesses.
You don’t need MS’ technology stack to use OData.
IBM implemented their OData server in Java.
This video shows consuming OData via cURL.
http://www.douglaspurdy.com/wp-content/uploads/odata.m4v
I don’t see it that way at all… SPARQL is a query language for RDF, which is a monstrosity of a specification that has existed for over 10 years and has gone virtually nowhere because it has suffered from technical sprawl – its proponents see it as a hammer and see everything else as a nail. There are so many aspects to RDF and its related technologies that it scares away everyone that looks at it. Not saying that it isn’t fundamentally good technology at its core, its just trying to accomplish ALOT more than this OData thing does.
YAML is just human readable JSON. That’s it.
As for the “linked data” thing from TBL… I thought that was RDF. Is there something else Im not aware of?
Anyway, I read the spec and from my point of view it looks more or less like a formalization of REST using existing open standards for serialization. REST itself isn’t a standard, it is simply a design idiom. This simply looks like an attempt to iron out a specific dialect for implementing what is essentially a REST-style web service using http, json, and atom specifically for the purose of interfacing with a SQL backend.
Why all the hate? I don’t see anything about the protocol or the data representation formats that looks even remotely like an attempt at a lock-in… Most of the parts are optional – I could write a basic conforming client using nothing but the 20 or so page description on the OData site in virtually any language – you don’t even need the SDK.
And while the server side of the equation is somewhat more complex, there is nothing about it that would require any special microsoft secret sauce – it is very straightforward and for the most part seems logically consistent.
Ill admit this is not the most original idea – there is lots of existing code that does virtually the same thing, but there is no existing standard that tries to solve this particular problem in such a simple way. I don’t see anything obviously devious about this…
I was sitting 6 feet from my TV when I read the spec, does that count? Seriously, I agree with your statement for the most part MS doesn’t have a particularly good track record when it comes to standards – but a broken clock is still right twice a day. This one doesn’t look so bad on the surface at least. As for all the MS specific stuff in the SDK, who cares about that – the specification is what matters. All that stuff is just fluff.
MS ‘Open’ Standard =! Open
Please, don’t insult our intellect.
They are trying – as usual – to reinvent the wheel.
everyone dismissing this thing right off the bat should reconsider. first the OData protocol is based on Atom publishing technology (like RSS). Also OData is stupidly simple and straight forward. This is a good thing, if for nothing else than its incentive for it’s competitors to make an ever better product for competition sake.
Personally I think this is a good thing, not everything that comes out of MS is bad you know.