Can Ado Data Services replace my webservices which i use in ajax calls in my websites?

Question

I used to create normal webservices in my websites, and call these services from javascript to make ajax calls.

Now i am learning about Ado Data Services, My question is: Does this Ado Data Services can replace my normal webservice in new sites i will create?

And if Yes,

Can i put these Ado Data Services in a separate project "local on the same server" and just reference from my website? "to use the same services for my websites internal use and also give the same services to other websites or services, the same as twitter for example doing"

Answer 1

depends what you want to do , I suggest you read my conversation with Pablo Castro the architect of Ado.Net Data Services

• Data Services - Lacking

Here is basically Pablo's words.

I agree that some of these things are quite inconvenient and we're looking at fixing them (e.g. use of custom types in addition to types defined in the input model in order to produce custom result-sets). However, some others are just intrinsic to the nature of Data Services.

The Data Services framework is not a gateway to a database and in general if you need something like that then Data Services will just get in the way. The goal of Data Services is to create a resource model out of an input data model, and expose it with a RESTful interface that exposes the uniform interface, such that every unit of data in the underlying model ("entities") become an addressable resource that can be manipulated with the standard verbs.

Often the actual implementation of a RESTful interface includes more sophisticated behaviors than just doing CRUD over the data under the covers, which need to be defined in a way that doesn't break the uniform interface. That's why the Data Services server runtime has hooks for business logic and validation in the form of query/change interceptors and others. We also acknowledge that it's not always possible or maybe practical to model absolutely everything as resources operated with standard verbs, so we included service operations as a escape-hatch.

Things like joins dilute the abstraction we're trying to create. I'm not saying that they are bad or anything (relational databases without them wouldn't be all that useful), it's just that if what's required for a given application scenario is the full query expressiveness of a relational database to be available at the service boundary, then you can simply exchange queries over the wire (and manage the security implications of that). For joins that can be modeled as association traversals, then data services already has support for them.

I guess this is a long way to say that Data Services is not a solution for every problem that involves exposing data to the web. If you want a RESTful interface over a resource model that matches our underlying data model, then it usually works out well and it will save you a lot of work. If you need a custom inteface or direct access to a database, then Data Services is typically not the right tool and other framework components such as WCF's SOAP and REST support do a great job at that.