I’m happy to announce that Citrix, IBM, Microsoft, Progress Software, SAP and WSO2 are jointly submitting a proposal for the standardization of OData to OASIS.
While the OASIS OData Technical Committee will standardize OData, the great collaboration will continue in the odata.org community to grow the library of producers and consumers and, share implementation and Interop experiences, etc.
The starting point for the proposal is the current OData v3 specification plus a number of proposed extensions that use the protocol extensibility points to add functionality without having to increase the footprint of the core specification.
We often have discussions within the team, with developers out there and the community about what OData can and cannot do and whether we should add this or that feature. In that context we always come back to the same few principles that guide the design of OData: the main value of this technology is not any particular design choice but the fact that enough people agree to the same pattern, thus removing friction from sharing data across independent producers and consumers. For that to work the protocol must remain simple for simple cases, cover more sophisticated cases reasonably well and avoid inventing stuff as much as possible.
With interoperability front and center in OData we saw more and more technology stacks that started to work with it. Now there are a number of companies that use OData in their products to ensure the data they manage is easily accessible beyond the boundaries of their applications. Many of these companies regularly collaborate on the ongoing design effort for OData. While so far we’ve run the OData design process as transparently as we could (sharing designs, taking feedback through the odata.org blog and distribution list, etc.), we are at a point where the level of adoption and the scale at which organizations are betting on OData require a more formal commitment to shared ownership of the design of this protocol.
We have a good amount of work ahead of us in the OASIS TC, but this is the first step. We’ll keep posting to this blog with updates as things progress.
We encourage others to get involved to learn more about the protocol and design decisions that were made in developing the protocol. Go to odata.org, check out the OData blog and join the OData mailing list (the instructions are on odata.org). Join the OASIS OData TC and help us standardize the protocol!
We’re happy to see OData take this important step on the journey towards standardization. Thanks to all the folks out there that helped get OData this far.
-pablo