Infosys | Microsoft

The developers can leverage new Client Object model which is a subset of the types/members available in Micorosft.SharePoint namespace in the server object model. There are different flavors of the Client Object Model that can be used within JavaScript, Silverlight and .Net managed application. Although it does not provide the entire set, it contains enough APIs which can be used to access most of the data from the platform. The object model is very easy to use as compared to web services available in SharePoint.

Client Object Model allows one to easily access data stored in SharePoint from different types of applications / services like Silverlight, desktop applications or web applications hosted in a different server. This has enabled to create Rich Internet Applications and mashups by surfacing the data from SharePoint within these applications. To learn more about how Client Object works or how it can be used, do read the nice article from Eric White

Then there is OData

 There is a new Web protocol to surface and access data from different sources (not really new. It got the current around end of 2009). I have been looking at OData for a while now. I really like OData as it is built on existing technologies like HTTP and AtomPub and allows easy access to data from different sources. This is released from Microsoft under Open Specification promise to allow anyone to freely interoperate with OData implementations. Microsoft has released APIs to develop producers as well as consumers based on this protocol. Producers are the services that expose the data while consumers are the services / applications that access this data.

One of the coolest features that I like in the SharePoint 2010 is the support for OData. This means SharePoint has new services that expose data related to all the lists and documents based on OData protocol. The neat thing here is that any OData enabled client can access now SharePoint data. How cool is this? Developers can easily leverage client libraries available to develop rich applications that consume SharePoint data. Client libraries are available for Silverlight, JavaScript, .NET, Windows phone 7 and the list is growing. The end point that exposes the data in SharePoint is available at the URL - http://<SiteURL>/_vti_bin/listdata.svc which can be consumed by client application as a service. One can also leverage the OData URI conventions to access the data.