Pete Lacey’s Weblog

Update (already): Alex Barnett’s two most recent posts are about Astoria.  Read them, follow the links, watch the video.  I think this will be exciting.
Follow along with me on this one.

My colleague at Burton Group, Lyn Robison, is working on a report that, in part, argues for separating information from the applications that use it via a data services layer. After all, says Lyn, information and applications are very different, and should be managed separately.

Over at Quoderat, David Megginson, provides the REST elevator pitch: “With REST, every piece of information has its own URL.”

Meanwhile, Don Box shouts out what is quickly becoming axiomatic: “(HTTP) GET is one of the most optimized pieces of distributed systems plumbing in the world.”

Finally, Stefan Tilkov points out the Astoria skunk-works project coming out of Microsoft Live Labs.

The goal of Microsoft Codename Astoria is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by web clients within a corporate network and across the internet. The data service is reachable over HTTP, and URIs are used to identify the various pieces of information available through the service. Interactions with the data service happens in terms of HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, and the data exchanged in those interactions is represented in simple formats such as XML and JSON.

I love it when a plan comes together.