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Microsoft’s Marching to ‘Astoria’


Research project exposes SQL Server data via ADO.NET as services

By David Worthington
June 1, 2007 — 
Microsoft Research is incubating a new SQL Server data service for Web applications, code-named Astoria, that exposes data as a service to be consumed by Web clients within corporate networks and across the Internet.

Astoria uses the ADO.NET Entity Data Model and exposes entities as addressable resources to identify what information is available through the service.

Services can be accessed using HTTP requests with agents, using regular verbiage. Astoria URIs can point to a specific entity within a set by addressing the entity key defined in a service’s data model schema. A URI can sort data by its properties when control information is included in the data string.

“The use of Web-friendly technologies makes Astoria ideal as a data back end for AJAX-style applications, rich interactive applications and other applications that need to operate against data that lives across the Web,” said Fran?ois Ajenstat, product management director for SQL Server.

The payload format is controlled by the client, and represented in the XML and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data interchange formats. JSON integrates with AJAX applications.

Pablo Castro, Microsoft’s ADO.NET technical lead, speculates in a white paper on the Astoria Web site (astoria.mslivelabs.com) that UI elements in the ASP.NET AJAX framework will natively understand the Astoria URIs and that an Astoria client-side library will be built into Silverlight, Microsoft’s plug-in for rich interactive applications.

DRIVING ASP.NET USE
At least one analyst sees Astoria as a way to increase the use of ASP.NET. “Astoria appears to be based on the ADO.NET entity framework [for actual storage]. If it pans out, it could make ASP.NET a more popular platform for AJAX apps,” said Greg DeMichillie, an analyst with market research firm Directions on Microsoft.

A Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Astoria data services toolkit for ASP.NET is available from Microsoft Live Labs.

In related news, the ADO.NET team, in early May, released the first CTP of Dynamic ADO.NET, formerly known by its project code name, Jasper. Jasper is a set of extensions to the ADO.NET entity framework that add a level of abstraction to data programming. With Jasper, developers work with entities instead of database schema, can query within the entity framework, and use auto-binding capabilities for binding data to a UI.

The CTP targets the Orcas edition of VB.NET and Iron Python 1.1. It works with any CLR language that supports late binding, and in the future, any language written on the Dynamic Language Runtime.


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