I was told by experts, that ODATA is useful for communicating from Web clients to cloud databases services, where direct communication between the Web client and SQL database servers is not possible ( e.g. Windows 8.1 Desktop Apps can´t communicate by SQL, firewalls, ... ) or useful.
The ODATA server communicates with the ODATA Web client.
The ODATA server communicates by SQL with the local databases installed in the cloud data center.
“Starting January 1st 2016 the Swagger Specification has been donated to the Open API Initiative (OAI) and has been renamed to the OpenAPI Specification”.
“A simple yet powerful representation of your RESTful API”.
Swagger UI - “A dependency-free collection of HTML, Javascript, and CSS assets that dynamically generate beautiful documentation and sandbox from a Swagger-compliant API”.
You must not implement all REST functions for every REST URI!
REST has nothing to do with UI design .
Design goal:
One-time distribution of applications ( think of the Apple / Android / Windows AppStores, where you can´t provide high-frequent updates due to the complicated long-term acceptance process ).
Typical Process:
Just provide one single “stable” webservice URL to the application.
The web server returns a Json representation with links.
Let the application find all other links by this representation, using a “Link Discoverer”.
Use Link relation instead of “hardcoded links”. Explain these links relations ( “Rels” ) by other URL links, to web pages which explain hwo to deal with the data.
Poll the webservice by checking the HTML ETags for data changes.