ADO.NET Data Service — non .NET consumers

Question

Has anyone come across an example of a non .Net consumer of an ADO.NET Data Service? I am on the second day of looking at what Astoria is and how it can be used. I am also trying to answer why would I use this instead of a web service?

After getting my examples running, I kind get the RESTful approach to getting data out the system. And, plugging it into a .net client is incredibly easy. But, then I wondered how a non-.NET consumer would go about it.

Any ideas (pointers) definitely appreciated...

Answer 1

Well since ADO.NET Data Services exposes itself as a RESTful service anything that can make RESTful calls to a URI can properly use the service. I think rather than looking for .NET related to X technology you should look up the technology you're using (Python, PHP, Whatever) on how to call RESTful services. Once ADO.NET hosts the data service... it's up and for anyone to use.

Answer 2

We now have PHP and JAVA client libraries to communicate with ADO.NET Data Services based services.

Answer 3

To consume an ADO.NET Data Service all that is needed is the ability to make HTTP requests using the GET, POST, PUT and DELETE verbs and to set the Accept header.

Not all programming environments offer these, e.g. Silverlight 2 and J2ME can only do GET and POST, not PUT and DELETE. This means that it is not possible to do updates or deletes from a Java Micro Edition client to the latest version of ADO.NET Data Services (1.5 CTP).

Answer 4

There is also a fairly mature AJAX based client library for Data Services. See the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit for more information or just go to OData.org.