I’ve mentioned in previous posts that various folks at Microsoft have come to grips with the fact that RESTful Web services are the best way to expose data sources on the Web. One problem I’ve voiced is that we may forget that REST is about uniform interfaces and end up with half a dozen different Microsoft protocols for doing essentially the same thing. This seemed to be the case when you consider Project Astoria and Web3S, both of which are designed for creating, retrieving, updating and deleting relational or not so relational data via a uniform interface over the Web. I’ve written about both projects in the past, see Google Base Data API vs. Astoria: Two Approaches to SQL-like Queries in a RESTful Protocol and Web3S: A RESTful Protocol for Accessing Windows Live Services if you’d like an overview of both technologies.
However, thanks to enterprising folks like Yaron and Pablo on both sides there is a much better story coming from Microsoft with regards to RESTful protocols which should please even the Atom contingent. The details are in Pablo’s post Astoria Design: payload formats which contains lots of juicy nuggets.
Let’s begin.
Pablo writes
The goal of Astoria is to make data available to loosely coupled systems for querying and manipulation. In order to do that we need to use protocols that define the interaction model between the producer and the consumer of that data, and of course we have to serialize the data in some form that all the involved parties understand. So protocols and formats are an important topic in our design process.…Multiple formats, one protocol (almost) For the most part there is a single “protocol”, and by that I mean the set of HTTP headers for requests and responses, as well as the overall interaction model. In certain cases in order to make a format really look natural to clients we do need to introduce a format-specific protocol element, but we try to keep those to a minimum. Also, any added protocol elements on top of HTTP need to be done so that unsophisticated agents can ignore a lot of that, do “plain HTTP” and still get by for the most part. …Now, with the almost-single protocol in place, the question comes to which formats should we do. Right now we’re thinking ATOM/APP, Web3S, and JSON. We need to define the basic requirements for any format used in Astoria, and then map those to each format we want to support. That’s what comes next.
The goal of Astoria is to make data available to loosely coupled systems for querying and manipulation. In order to do that we need to use protocols that define the interaction model between the producer and the consumer of that data, and of course we have to serialize the data in some form that all the involved parties understand. So protocols and formats are an important topic in our design process.…Multiple formats, one protocol (almost)
For the most part there is a single “protocol”, and by that I mean the set of HTTP headers for requests and responses, as well as the overall interaction model. In certain cases in order to make a format really look natural to clients we do need to introduce a format-specific protocol element, but we try to keep those to a minimum.
Also, any added protocol elements on top of HTTP need to be done so that unsophisticated agents can ignore a lot of that, do “plain HTTP” and still get by for the most part. …Now, with the almost-single protocol in place, the question comes to which formats should we do. Right now we’re thinking ATOM/APP, Web3S, and JSON. We need to define the basic requirements for any format used in Astoria, and then map those to each format we want to support. That’s what comes next.
What this means in practice is that Astoria defines the protocol semantics while Web3S will define the data format specific semantics. Even more interesting is that services that utilize Astoria will be able to take advantage of any client applications or libraries that support the Atom Publishing Protocol as long as they aren’t in reality tied to a proprietary implementation of APP such as GData (e.g. Windows Live Writer).
Pablo’s post goes on to talk about the data model used by Astoria and how it is mapped to Atom, JSON and Web3S respectively. He also calls for feedback from the community, so if you are interested in Microsoft’s implementation of RESTful protocols either as a developer customer or an interested observer…let Pablo know in the comments to his blog. There are lots of folks at Microsoft who’d love to hear what y’all have to say.
Before I forget, Pablo did have this to day about their RDF support.
What happened with RDF? The May 2007 CTP also included support for RDF. While we got positive comments about the fact we supported it, we didn’t see any early user actually using it and we haven’t seen a particular popular scenario where RDF was a must-have. So we are thinking that we may not include RDF as a format in the first release of Astoria, and focus on the other 3 formats (which are already a bunch from the development/testing perspective). My personal take is that while I understand how RDF fits in the picture of the semantic web and related tools, the semantic web goes well beyond a particular format. The point is to have well-defined, derivable semantics from services. I believe that Astoria does this independently of the format being used.
What happened with RDF?
The May 2007 CTP also included support for RDF. While we got positive comments about the fact we supported it, we didn’t see any early user actually using it and we haven’t seen a particular popular scenario where RDF was a must-have. So we are thinking that we may not include RDF as a format in the first release of Astoria, and focus on the other 3 formats (which are already a bunch from the development/testing perspective).
My personal take is that while I understand how RDF fits in the picture of the semantic web and related tools, the semantic web goes well beyond a particular format. The point is to have well-defined, derivable semantics from services. I believe that Astoria does this independently of the format being used.
For some reason, I'm not surprised about this decision. I do wonder if dropping RDF will actually bring to light some closet RDF supporters who'd love to see supported in Astoria?
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