BANGALORE, INDIA: Everyone is familiar with RSS feeds today. Their success is easily attributable to the fact that they provide information from the web as structured data that can be subscribed to.

Now imagine if other customer data on the web is also made available as a service, similar to RSS feeds! For instance, consider an online movie rental store that provides unique addresses for every movie, so that a consumer's application can query this data depending on the users' choice. This is where OData comes in handy.

OData utilizes web technologies that most developers are already familiar with, -- HTTP, AtomPub, and JSON. It helps developers expose data on the web in a simple and secure manner. This data once exposed can be consumed by OData aware applications. Microsoft has released OData under the Open Specification Promise (OSP) to allow anyone to freely interoperate with OData implementations.

There are a number of Microsoft products that support OData, namely SharePoint Server 2010, Excel 2010 (through SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel), Windows Azure Storage, SQL Server 2008 R2,Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the .NET Framework.

Microsoft provides client libraries for .NET, Silverlight, AJAX, Windows Phone 7, PHP, Javascript, Ruby, Objective C and Java. One can implement OData in any HTTP server using any language. On the .NET Framework, WCF.NET data services provides a framework that allows developers to create a OData services in .NET. Likewise in Java there is a server library called Odata.

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