I’ve been reading up on Microsoft Astoria, which was talked about at Mix07 but seems to have been lost in the noise around the Silverlight announcement.

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 corporate networks and across the internet. The data service is reachable over regular HTTP requests, and standard HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE are used to perform operations against the service.

Am I right in suggesting that Microsoft is making it possible to do CRUD operations over HTTP disguised as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE? The data delivered as open formats, XML and JSON, would then be consumable by any application as a URI. Basically by saying they are enabling a relational data store in the cloud they are also saying that the cloud is itself, aka the web, is nothing more than another data storage device.

Tags: Microsoft Astoria