"Astoria" RESTful Data Services for AJAX/Silverlight Solutions

Yup, again, probably the last to spot this, but Angus pinged me the link yesterday and it looks kinda interesting...  If you've done any web service requests from the likes of Javascript and Popfly then you'll appreciate that there is no SOAP stack and you need to take the RESTful route and Plain Old XML.

Well enter "Astoria", and as I understand it the goal of the project is about making it easier to support RESTful style services in the absence of SOAP stacks, so check out https://astoria.mslivelabs.com/Default.aspx

Brief description cut and pasted from the Astoria site

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.

Snippet on REST from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REST

The most important HTTP methods are PUT, GET, POST and DELETE. These are often compared with the CREATE, READ, UPDATE, DELETE (CRUD) operations associated with database technologies. An analogy can also be made to cut and paste : PUT is analogous to CREATE or PASTE OVER, GET to READ or COPY, POST to UPDATE or PASTE AFTER, and DELETE to DELETE or CUT. The CRUD verbs are designed to operate on atomic data within the context of a database transaction. REST is designed around the atomic transfer of a more complex state, such as can be seen in place of a structured document from one application to another.

Nice... d