Difference between OData and REST web services

Question

What is the difference between OData and REST-ful web services

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OData  Open Data Protocol  is an OASIS standard that defines the best   practice for building and consuming RESTful APIs  OData helps you   focus on your business logic while building RESTful APIs without   having to worry about the approaches to define request and response   headers  status codes  HTTP methods  URL conventions  media types    payload formats and query options etc  OData also guides you about   tracking changes  defining functions actions for reusable procedures   and sending asynchronous batch requests etc  Additionally  OData   provides facility for extension to fulfil any custom needs of your   RESTful APIs       OData RESTful APIs are easy to consume  The OData metadata  a   machine-readable description of the data model of the APIs  enables   the creation of powerful generic client proxies and tools  Some of   them can help you interact with OData even without knowing anything   about the protocol  The following 6 steps demonstrate 6 interesting   scenarios of OData consumption across different programming platforms    But if you are a non-developer and would like to simply play with   OData  XOData is the best start for you    for more details at http   www odata org

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From the OData documentation      The OData Protocol is an application-level protocol for interacting with data via RESTful web services                 The OData Protocol is different from other REST-based web service approaches in that it provides a uniform way to describe both the data and the data model

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In 2012 OData underwent standardization  so I ll just add an update here    First the definitions   REST - is an architecture of how to send messages over HTTP    OData V4-  is a specific implementation of REST  really defines the content of the messages in different formats  currently I think is AtomPub and JSON   ODataV4 follows rest principles   For example  asp net people will mostly use WebApi controller to serialize deserialize objects into JSON and have javascript do something with it  The point of Odata is being able to query directly from the URL with  out-of-the-box options

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UPDATE  Warning  this answer is extremely out of date now that OData V4 is available     I wrote a post on the subject a while ago here   As Franci said  OData is based on Atom Pub   However  they have layered some functionality on top and unfortunately have ignored some of the REST constraints in the process     The querying capability of an OData service requires you to construct URIs based on information that is not available  or linked to in the response   It is what REST people call out-of-band information and introduces hidden coupling between the client and server     The other coupling that is introduced is through the use of EDMX metadata to define the properties contained in the entry content   This metadata can be discovered at a fixed endpoint called  metadata   Again  the client needs to know this in advance  it cannot be discovered   Unfortunately  Microsoft did not see fit to create media types to describe these key pieces of data  so any OData client has to make a bunch of assumptions about the service that it is talking to and the data it is receiving

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REST is a generic design technique used to describe how a web service can be accessed  Using REST you can make http requests to get data  If you try it in your browser it would be just like going to a website except instead of returning a web page you would get back XML  Some services will also return data in JSON format which is easier to use with Javascript   OData is a specific technology that exposes data through REST   If you want to sum it up real quick  think of it as    REST - design pattern OData - enabling technology

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The OData protocol is built on top of the AtomPub protocol  The AtomPub protocol is one of the best examples of REST API design  So  in a sense you are right - the OData is just another REST API and each OData implementation is a REST-ful web service   The difference is that OData is a specific protocol  REST is architecture style and design pattern

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REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer which is a resource based architectural style  Resource based means that data and functionalities are considered as resources   OData is a web based protocol that defines a set of best practices for building and consuming RESTful web services  OData is a way to create RESTful web services thus an implementation of REST

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ODATA is a special kind of REST where we can query data uniformly from URL

[web-services] Difference between OData and REST web services

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