The eXtreme Scale development team has just released technical preview 2 of the WebSphere eXtreme Scale REST data service. The WebSphere eXtreme Scale REST data service is an interface to eXtreme Scale which implements the ADO.NET Data Services protocol, which is essentially a REST interface to a variety of different data sources. You can check out the details here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/bb931106.aspx
Both Microsoft ADO.NET clients and RESTful clients can take advantage of the service. Microsoft ADO.NET clients can use the rich tooling built into Visual Studio 2008 for building and integrating ADO .NET applications with the data service. Since the transport is based on REST, any application that can participate in a REST conversation is a potential client to the data source. In the case of the eXtreme Scale REST data service, the data source is an eXtreme Scale data grid taking advantage of the highly scalable and highly available properties of the grid. To demonstrate the flexibility of this standard, Microsoft has recently released a toolkit for integrating PHP applications with any ADO.NET data service. You can find out more about that here:
http://phpdataservices.codeplex.com/
The first technical preview included the following features to get started:
- Create, Read, Update and Delete (CRUD) Operation Support
- AtomPUB XML Support
- Automatic data type conversion
- EntitySet modeling using the EntityManager configuration or annotations
- IBM WebSphere Application Server and Apache Tomcat support
The following features are new for technical preview 2:
- Relationship support
Relationships between two or more entities can now be modeled. The REST data service allows navigation and modification of entity instance relationships at runtime.
- Batch retrieval support
Multiple queries can now run within a single HTTP request and transaction, increasing performance.
- OrderBy Support
Query results can now be returned in ascending or descending order by one or more properties.
Check out the download page and wiki for more information.
