Ria Services vs WCF Dataservices

Question

My Team are evaluation to a bigger Business portal. (Invoicing, Bookkeeping, Salaries.....)

We are all used to work with DDD, O/R mappers with NHibernate as our first choice. We have chosen to work with CompositeWPF to keep modularity between all modules and part system in the business portal.

Now we have evaluated Ria Services and are kind of disappointed how it works in a Data Oriented way, Data Oriented can be good in a service oriented scenario, but we feel that we can with an Object Oriented approach to, and we feel that we can get an application with less complexity with the OO approach than the DO approach. For example it doesn't allow Value Objects, Many-to-many relations, everything needs to have keys and so on.

We haven't looked at WCF Data Services yet so our question is WCF Data Services our answere? Does it integrate good with Silverlight 4? Can we work with it in a OO manor?

Answer 1

RIA / WCF is not about replacing O/R mappers etc. It is about exposing data in an open format to another application. Not high end, but basically for integration. It is IMHO pretty stupid to put that within an application, but it is a great external interface, especially as it gets tooling support.

Good examples:

• Bank accounting access. If I only could do home banking using Odata ;) And get my account statements into excel.
• Trading ;) Yeah, ok - I have a trading server (that then connects to various brokers). I have a web front end. I now will expose certain data through OData, too, so I can easily get things out in excel etc., or even use a silverlight application for some stuff... but i will NOT use OData within one application to replace my object infrastructure- way too muc hoverhead.
• Ebay could provide an OData interface for larger customers. Nice to get an overview over your auctions AND do some basic maintenance on your account. Nothing high performance, but again, TOOLING support. Excel, Report services all soon support OData.

If you look at it from that integration point of view it makes a LOT mroe sense. It is not a full environment - that "never" works. It is a great standardization, though, to open up an application with semantics (better than web services - standardized query and filter logic) AND tooling support.

I somehow dont really run into many problems with a lot of items you mention, though:

• Anything I work with has a key per definition
• I neve rdo many:many relations. I always havean interim object WITH A KEY.... so that I can add properties to it (and if that is only a timestamp).

The servies ARE data oriented, and seriously - I love them. I am a big OO fan, but the tooling support makes that a PERFECT external interface for applications.