Frank Mantek Discusses the Google Data API (GDATA)
This presentation from QCon 2008 discusses the structure of GDATA, design choices behind the API, and its relationship to other Google API's. A very generic discussion of GDATA and the Cloud concludes the talk.
Mantek suggests that the vision behind GData is captured in a quote from Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo:
"The benefit of [GData] is that you'd have a single API that could be used to query, update, and index structured data on the Web -- anywhere on the Web. It's a pretty powerful vision and something I didn't expect to see for a couple more years."
Google offers a lot of APIs and most of them incorporate some kind of data access capability: a situation that Frank describes as "freaking complicated." GData is intended to provide a more common, less complicated, and easier to use standard API. Adoption by the engineers responsible for the other APIs (at the time of the presentation) was not yet universal.
GData is grounded in the REST Protocol and not SOAP. Mantek discusses some of the reasons why, emphasizing the simplicity of REST over SOAP.
The Atom Publishing Protocol provides the foundation for GData and, in fact, GData might be seen as an extension of the Atom protocol, on that adds a Data Model, Query model, Concurrency model, and Authentication model. A significant part of the presentation is devoted to a discussion of both the Atom protocol structure and the Google extensions that comprise GData.
View The Google Data API (GData); a timely and informative presentation by Frank Mantek.