Does anyone outside the MSFT community care about OData?

Question

OData is being touted as a new open standard for REST-style data services, but I can't find much evidence of it being used in anger by anyone who isn't plugged into the MSFT developer community. If it's an open standard I would have expected to some more traction from the Java/Ruby/Python/PHP communities.

The background behind the question is that I am looking at creating some open (public) data apis, and whilst OData seems like an obvious route to go down, it feels like the web dev community doesn't really care?

Answer 1

According to a recent PDC lecture, presented by Pablo Castro, there are already (at least planned) servers and services from IBM and SAP. There are already client libraries for Java, PHP and Ruby. But widespread usage of the standard outside the Microsoft community may remain to be seen.

In any case, if you do provide your data with this standard, your consumers should generally not have problems with getting that data from you. And that's maybe what matters.

Answer 2

To me the benefits of OData are less around helping developers consume an API (since REST already makes this easy) but more around letting non-developers be able to bring the data into an OData compliant application like Excel.

Now that being said, I still believe it has a huge benefit to developers consuming your API. Take a look at this jquery plugin. http://github.com/egil/jquery.odata/wiki