Re: [xml-dev] OData/GData ... when REST isn't enough ?

David Lee scripsit:

> Today a colleague introduced me to "OData" (Open Data - from Microsoft)
> which I immediately saw from Wikipedia has a competing protocol "GData"
> (Google Data).

I can't speak to OData, but I worked on GData during my three years
at Google.

> Embarrassingly, I've never heard of either.   After reading the quick
> guides on both, it leaves me wondering ... "Why ...?"  Why another
> protocol?  Isn't REST enough ? And if you want something more complex
> then  SOAP or XMLRPC or a few million other protocols.   But I'm
> (fairly) sure these were not invented just to have another TLA ...

GData is not a protocol (it uses REST) nor even a format (which
is Atom and AtomPub).  It's a specialized use of Atom to transmit
non-document data.  For example, you can get a GData feed for a Google
spreadsheet containing any of the named areas of the spreadsheet, or
else the whole spreadsheet.  Each cell is a separate entry in the feed.
You can use AtomPub to PUT a new version of the entry back to the cell,
altering the spreadsheet.

-- 
Dream projects long deferred             John Cowan <>
usually bite the wax tadpole.            http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        --James Lileks