SharePoint Development Models

As mentioned in my last blog about Uses of SharePoint, that SharePoint does not only rely on the features or functions it provides out of the box, but the implementation can be customized to streamline pretty much any aspect of business collaboration.

There are many ways of development in SharePoint, majorly categorized as below:

1. Server Side Object Model : These are those solutions which are created in Visual studio and deployed on SharePoint server only. Microsoft provides Microsoft.Sharepoint.dll for its implementation.
2. Client Side Object Model: These are the solutions which are created in either .Net or some other language like JavaScript but are not deployed on SharePoint server. These could be used in SharePoint sites or somewhere else.
   Microsoft provides two ways for this implementation:
   .Net Managed CSOM: Microsoft provides Microsoft.Sharepoint.client.dll for this. As .Net is used in this object model people often refer to it as server side code but actually it is part of client side object model as it is not deployed on the SharePoint server.
   JavaScript Object Model: Microsoft provides SP.js javascript library. SharePoint itself uses this js library. Apart from this Jquery also provides library SPservices.js for connecting to SharePoint
3. SharePoint Designer: SharePoint Designer is software program which connects to SharePoint site and making basic changes like updating pages, developing basic workflows etc. These pages are stored in the SharePoint database like all other SharePoint pages.
4. SharePoint APIs:These are used majorly for your remote mobile or web applications. 
   Rest APIs: This MSDN article details how to use SharePoint REST interface. SharePoint 2013 also provides support for oData in your REST queries. This article on MSDN pretty well explains how to use oData in REST requests
5. SharePoint App Model: This is not exactly a development model like above. It was introduced in SharePoint 2013. Now we could create a separate server on domain to deploy applications. These applications could use any of the above model apart from 1st. These apps are used on SharePoint portal. SharePoint authenticates these apps using oauth.