Douglas Purdy

WebSphere eXtreme Scale supports OData

with 2 comments

As noted on the OData.org site, WebSphere eXtreme Scale uses the OData protocol.

Billy Newport, an IBM Distinguished Engineer, was interviewed recently on why they selected a RESTful data service as the API and how OData helped.

The article: http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid26_gci1379765,00.html

More product details: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/downloads/xs_rest_service.html 

It is great to see that developers, regardless of platform/language, have a simple way to consume these services.

I’ll make one interesting note about this implementation.

As near as I can tell, Billy’s team implemented OData without ever talking to anyone at Microsoft.

I suspect they used the protocol documents we have online (these define the protocol with even greater precision that many standard specifications I have seen) and a HTTP trace tool.

Having been involved in distributed computing/protocol integration work for a long time, that is quite an achievement.

It could speak to simplicity of the protocol (it is just conventions/extensions over HTTP/AtomPub), the quality of the documentation or the intelligence/patience of the IBM team.

Likely it was all of these.

January 28th, 2010 at 8:16 pm

Posted in Microsoft, OData, Oslo, Software Development

2 Responses to 'WebSphere eXtreme Scale supports OData'

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  1. Yep,
    We never talked with Microsoft, just the early docs and then the ‘proper’ docs you published at the end. Kudos to Chris Johnson and the rest of the team to implementing the spec.

    Billy Newport

    31 Jan 10 at 22:56

  2. [...] IBM has implemented OData on WebSphere [...]

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