Fredericton .NET User Group / OData on September 22nd

The Fredericton .NET User Group’s site is live (and looking good, too!). If you live in or around Fredericton and are a .NET developer, be sure to bookmark both their site and Twitter account. They’ve got announcements about upcoming meetings as well as developer job listings for New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

(And don’t forget to register for TechDays Halifax, taking place November 2 – 3, while the early bird rate of CAD$349.99 still applies!)

Next Meeting: OData (Wednesday, September 22nd)

On Wednesday, September 22nd, the Fredericton .NET User Group’s meeting topic will be on OData and present by Andrew Trevors of SwiftRadius, an IT consulting company and Microsoft Certified Partner in Fredericton. OData, short for the Open Data Protocol, and it’s a web protocol for querying and updating data and free it from silos that exist in applications today. It applies and builds upon Web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) and JSON to provide access to information from a variety of applications, services, and stores.

The protocol emerged from experiences implementing AtomPub clients and servers in a variety of products over the past several years. OData is being used to expose and access information from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, relational databases, file systems, content management systems and traditional Web sites.

OData is consistent with the way the Web works – it makes a deep commitment to URIs for resource identification and commits to an HTTP-based, uniform interface for interacting with those resources (just like the Web).   This commitment to core Web principles allows OData to enable a new level of data integration and interoperability across a broad range of clients, servers, services, and tools.

OData is released under the Open Specification Promise to allow anyone to freely interoperate with OData implementations.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.