What is the relationship between OData , Atom, Json and WCF Data Service

Question

Recently I was learning WCF Data service. I know the Data Service expose the Data As Rest Resource Which can be manipulated by URL. But There are many technologies in this field. Hope someone can help me understand these .Thanks

Answer 1

OData is a protocol to expose (as you stated) Data As a REST Resource. The page to go to learn more is http://www.odata.org.

WCF Data Services is an implementation of the OData protocol (both client and server) by Microsoft on the .NET platform. So a service created by WCF Data Services uses the OData protocol.

ATOM is a standard format, and it is one of the possible wire formats for transferring data in the OData protocol. The OData protocol defines extensions to it. For better picture, ATOM is an XML based format which defines XML elements and their meaning (feeds, entries, links), and OData uses that along with couple of its own XML elements to serialize the data.

JSON is a standard format (for serialization of JavaScript objects) and it is one of the possible wire formats for transferring data in the OData protocol. So OData protocol uses JSON to serialize the data.