Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised May 30, 2026

Google Data Protocol

GData provides a simple protocol for reading and writing data on the Internet, designed by Google. GData combines common XML-based syndication formats with a feed-publishing system based on the Atom Publishing Protocol, plus some extensions for handling queries. It relies on XML or JSON as a data format.

Last revised
May 30, 2026
Read time
≈ 1 min
Length
201 w
Citations
6
Source
GData
Stable release
2.0.17 / April 20, 2012 (2012-04-20)
Written inJava, JavaScript, .NET, PHP, Python1 and Objective-C.2
Operating systemCross-platform
TypeSoftware development tools
Websitedevelopers.google.com/gdata/

GData (Google Data Protocol) provides a simple protocol for reading and writing data on the Internet, designed by Google. GData combines common XML-based syndication formats (Atom and RSS) with a feed-publishing system based on the Atom Publishing Protocol, plus some extensions for handling queries. It relies on XML or JSON as a data format.

According to the Google Developers portal, "The Google Data Protocol is a REST-inspired technology for reading, writing, and modifying information on the web. It is used in some older Google APIs."3 However, "Most Google APIs are not Google Data APIs."3

Google provides GData client libraries for Java, JavaScript, .NET, PHP, Python,1 and Objective-C.2

Implementations

An implementation called libgdata written in C is available under the LGPL license.

See also

See also

References

References

External links