Using Drupal on Windows Azure to create an OData repository by Brian Benz.
From the post:
OData is an easy to use protocol that provides access to any data defined as an OData service provider. Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., is collaborating with several other organizations and individuals in development of the OData standard in the OASIS OData Technical Committee, and the growing OData ecosystem is enabling a variety of new scenarios to deliver open data for the open web via standardized URI query syntax and semantics. To learn more about OData, including the ecosystem, developer tools, and how you can get involved, see this blog post.
In this post I’ll take you through the steps to set up Drupal on Windows Azure as an OData provider. As you’ll see, this is a great way to get started using both Drupal and OData, as there is no coding required to set this up.
It also won’t cost you any money – currently you can sign up for a 90 day free trial of Windows Azure and install a free Web development tool (Web Matrix) and a free source control tool (Git) on your local machine to make this happen, but that’s all that’s required from a client point of view. We’ll also be using a free tier for the Drupal instance, so you may not need to pay even after the 90 day trial, depending on your needs for bandwidth or storage.
So let’s get started!
Definitely worthwhile to spend some time getting to know the OData specification. It is currently under active development at OASIS.
Doesn’t do everything you might want but tries to do the things everyone needs as a basis for other services.
Thoughts on how to represent “merged” entities in OData subject to the conditions:
- Entities and their unique identifiers are not re-written, and
- Solution is consistent with the base OData data model?
Thinking back to the original text of ISO/IEC 13250 which required presentation of topic as merged, whether bits moved about to create a “merged” representation or not.
(Disclosure: I am a member of the OData TC.)