Software development framework for client/server applications using OData technology

Abstract

This final year project deals with the Open Data Protocol (OData), which is an open standard used for creation and consumption of RESTful Web Services, using REST, HTTP, and XML and JSON encoding formats. It defines a uniform model and approach for querying data being exposed by the service in a client/server distributed application architecture. The main aims of this FYP are to carry out an in-depth research about the subject and to be able to identify its advantages compared to other similar technologies including SOAP and traditional REST web services, and providing a convenient software development methodology/framework for such type of multi-tier applications for both .NET and Java platforms, using OData. A Movie Rental Company is used as a template of a typical scenario for designing and implementing a distributed application using the OData standard. A relational database is used as a data source which is exposed by the OData service, in order for the client to be able to perform CRUD operations. Both .NET and Java services and database are deployed on the Azure servers, for use by multiple clients over the Web. Both clients and services are implemented in Java and .NET platforms, which focus on object serialization in both encoding formats, HTTP requests/responses, data modelling, URL parsing and query processing and others, which prove the OData concept and its advantages, as per the aim of this project. Upon succession of the implementation, the artefacts are tested and evaluated. The evaluation results deal with comparing the development process and complexity for both platforms, and also how OData serves to be an advantageous approach compared to other standards, together with analyzing the performance of both XML and JSON for OData. This project concludes and proves that OData is in fact beneficial for creation of web services dealing with different types of data sources and different types of clients, and provides a conceptual guide for software developers who choose to use OData in the future.