Astoria Project on the way!

Microsoft’s Project Astoria has been in development since this summer. Astoria exposes data as web services through an Entity Framework Data Model. Once exposed, you can use URI based syntax to query data through the conceptual layer of the entity data model. You can control what is and isn't exposed and you can also do inserts, updates and deletes. The results can be output in a number of formats.

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.

The payload format for the data exchanged with the service can be controlled by the client and all options are simple, open formats such as plan XML and JSON.

The use of web-friendly technologies make it ideal as a data back-end for AJAX-style applications, Rich Interactive Applications and other applications that need to operate against data that is across the web.