Astoria: Data Services for the Web - Part 2
Back in April, the Data Programmability team at Microsoft announced "Astoria": Data Services for the Web, an incubation project exploring programming models for data over the web. As part of the announcement, the team deployed an online implementation of Astoria here, providing some sample read-only datasets for you to play with (see this post for examples). They also mentioned that plans were underway to allow web developers to define their own data model and have their own data stored as read-write relational data service "in the cloud", programmable over a RESTful API.
What's New
Today, Mike Flasko, Astoria Program Manager announced the delivery of this second piece of Astoria online service, where
"web developers can create custom structured data stores (up to 100MB in size) on the web and access them from anywhere that they have Internet access. These data services can then be the storage or data source for mashups, or the backing store for Internet enabled applications, or be applied to any other scenario where a rich data service on the web is required, independently of where it is hosted. "
(Astoria Program Manager? This is incubation project is going somewhere... :-)
You create your own data model for the Astoria online service by web-based tool that lets you define your data model (entities, properties and associations). Be warned - it's a little rough at the edges, but good enough. Once you've you've defined your data model the service generates the data store for you and hands you an URL...Yes! Your very own read/write REST interface to your own data store.
So now I've got my own relational data service going (note: will you require a username / password, which I ain't going to give you :-) at https://astoria.sandbox.live.com/users/alexrest/alexrest.rse
And all this without requiring the installation of Microsoft bits - no Visual Studio, no SQL Server, nada!
I'll be experimenting a little more with the new service and hope to share some interesting possibilities in the future, but I think it is fair to say that this incubation project has some seriously interesting and broad potential. Congrats to the team for pulling this off!
More at:
Previous Astoria posts:
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