Given the wild success of sites like Del.icio.us, flickr, et-web-2.0-cetera, it’s great to see Microsoft releasing a REST toolkit. I’ve had arguments with folks at work on the definition of a web service. They argue that it has a specific meaning within the developer community, I argue that in general usage people think of it as anything with an API.
REST based services are much more mash-up friendly because they don’t require special toolkits to use. They are much easier and faster to develop against for well formed data. Now, hopefully I can get some of that magic going where I work. I think of all the exports and such that could have been done so much faster if we had a REST base for them to hit…
Microsoft Project Codename “Astoria”
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.
To see what I’m talking about, check out the sample REST data sources they’ve exposed….
But wait, there's more
This work by MattK is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International