4. The Open Data Protocol (OData)

This sub-package defines functions and classes for working with OData, a data access protocol based on Atom and Atom Pub: http://www.odata.org/

This sub-package only deals with version 2 of the protocol at the moment.

OData is not an essential part of supporting the Standards for Learning, Education and Training (SLET) that gives pyslet its name, though I have actively promoted its use in these communities. As technical standards move towards using REST-ful web services it makes sense to converge around some common patterns for common use cases. Many of the protocols now being worked on are much more like basic data-access layers spread over the web between two co-operating systems. HTTP on its own is often good enough for these applications but when the data lends itself to tabular representations I think the OData standard is the best protocol available.

The purpose of this group of modules is to make is easy to use the conventions of the OData protocol as a general purpose data-access layer (DAL) for Python applications. To get started, look at the Data Consumers section which gives a high-level overview of the API with examples that use Microsoft’s Northwind data-service.

If you are interested in writing an OData provider, or you simply want to use these classes to implement a data access layer for your own application then look in OData Providers.