Thread: Providing data as a service

Application programming has seen an interesting evolution. We first moved away from developing applications that were tightly coupled to the as and programming language to decoupled ones. So users were no longer tied down to a single machine to access an application. They could access it from any platform. This has made the application into a service that can be accessed from anywhere. However, in both these cases, the data remains tightly coupled with the application, irrespective Of where you access it from. So the next obvious step is to decouple the data from the application, so that it can be accessed by other applications as well. This is in essence what ADO.NET is all about. It allows various applications to access various data sources like SQL Server, XML, or even those exposed by OLE DB, and modify or manipulate the data in them.



This makes data usage much more flexible. We'll take a hypothetical example to explain this benefit. Consider a school where the student attendance, once taken, is fed into a database. In the traditional way of working, one would run a query on this database and pull out various reports like how many days has a student been absent, which class has the best attendance, etc. This could then be shared with parents in a PTM. With ADO.NET, data service, this same data could be made available to parents over web on demand, or further, to their mobile devices if required. Sounds interesting? In this article, we'll tell you how to implement it.