Project 'Astoria'... the ODBC of the web age??

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Hi...

at the MIX I've been (after being adviced to have a look at the session) at "Accessing Data Seervices in the Cloud". Pablo Castro gave an overview on project "Astoria". Not only is Pablo a very good speaker, the project is really a hit.

After working through the whitepaper (you can find everything on https://astoria.mslivelabs.com/) I am pretty sure that this project (how ever it will be called on release) has the potential to be the ODBC of the web age. It seperates the client side totally from the server side while - if wanted - preserves the data schema. This makes it really easy to design because after spending some time on database design it is nice to see this directly translated into the web.

Astoria is a plugin into Visual Studio "Orcas" that generates ASP.NET / WCF code to access an underlying SQL database. The thing is that data access can be done via the URL and it supports paging and sorting and such alike. The response can be XML, JSON or RDF. So it can directly talk to clients using AJAX or Silverlight.

Have a look a the whitepaper to get the full story. It is worth reading!!!

Together with the project there is a hosting service only where you can make us of an "Astorian" frontend to design your own database in the cloud and access it. This captured my imagination...

Today hosters provide shared hosting packages where you get a database account and install a dynamic webpage on a frontend server (where your site and thousands of others are hosted at the same time). This game could change dramatically... (OK, I do oversimplify and look beyond what is done today)

The hoster could provide an "Astorian" frontend to the database and reduce the workload on the frontend server dramatically. The rendering is transferred to the client because the server only delivers "static" AJAX-based web-pages. The AJAX client connects to the "Astorian" frontend directly. The same game with Silverlight...

I am just thinking on delivering a community website for our XTOPIA event with no web-frontend at all. Just the services exposed through "Astoria" ;-)

Or:

Defining the services to access the datasources in a special path (e.g. www.mywebsite.com/services) and a frontend where everybody can upload their own implementation of the website by uploading AJAX websites /Silverlight apps and the user can mashup her/his very own site.

(Yes, I see the security problems burried within and no, I am not quite sure how to overcome them).

I'll keep you posted...

CU

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