Astoria is a new project coming out of Microsoft's Data Programmability team. Astoria is a web service, but more specifically, a "web data service", that enables clients to interact with data through URIs using standard HTTP verbs such as POST and GET. The back end is served up by the Entity Framework. Therefore you are not exposing your database, but controlling what is exposed and how it's structured through the conceptual layer of an Entity Data Model.

Astoria exposes its data in a number of formats - XML, JSON, RDF and they are still working out the various payloads. The JSON format speaks loudly to anyone building AJAX applications. The possibilities for Astoria in mash-ups will be endless.

I've written a number of posts about Astoria in the past few days as I've been getting ready to present on this topic at an upcoming New England Code Camp (9/29- 9/30) as well as REMIX07 Boston (10/8 - 10/9)

• What the heck is Astoria?
• QuickStart for building an Astoria data service
• More fun with Astoria - random queries in the browser
• Astoria is sick (as in SLICK) when it comes to DML!
• Trying to see what Astoria messages look like in the pipe

Yesterday, Pablo Castro & Mike Flasko of the Astoria team, posted a blog explaining their ideas for fine-tuning the URI syntax for querying against the data services and asking for your feedback. While we currently have access to the prototype bits, they are working on the actual production code and it's a great opportunity to have your say about how the final product works.

They would LOVE your feedback as they debate the pros and cons of different syntaxes.

They have been keen on being transparent about the design process, so much so that Pablo wrote a blog post just on that topic. I remember at MIX07 when somebody asked Pablo why they were showing such early prototypes of things that may never even come to be? (Astoria is definitely coming to be! It is now in the product pipeline!) He responded that their options ranged from never sharing anything and just deploying finished products and saying 'here it is hope you like it" to letting us have access to all of their emails and really overdoing it. Finding a sweet spot that doesn't torturing us & wasting our time and enabling us to help ensure that products are built that do what we need withouth overwhelming us is a challenge.

So take advantage of the opportunity to help shape what is going to be a great data technology and give the team some feedback about the URI syntax.