What's your take on the wire formats Astoria should support?

As much as I'd like to say that formats are a low-level thing that most consumers of the technology shouldn't need to worry about, the reality is that payload format for a data service is something that a lot of folks care about. Since we started with the first CTP of Astoria we got a lot of feedback around them; while working on the design of the real product we've also have been discussing the topic extensively.

There are many aspects that form the requirements for a format, ranging from very specific, technical ones such as performance, existence of parsers and expressiveness all the way to pure subjective matters such as esthetics.

Check out this entry in the Astoria team blog. It discusses our current thinking about formats and shows some details about the formats we plan to support. I'd encourage you to provide feedback if you have an opinion about the topic.

-pablo