Major trends are clearly drawn in the Web services landscape by now. Take for instance the use of the enterprise service bus (ESB) as an SOA enabler, or the widely debated SOAP vs. REST design approach, or how the WS-* stack addresses many enterprise scenarios. The point is that the industry's compasses are pretty much settled and pointing in the same direction. However, the way in which these trends are embodied by vendors into products is quite a different thing. So up next we will address one of the latest embodiments to come out of the Microsoft product-line, exploring its purpose as well as its relation to other Web services-related projects like Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and .NET, its code-name: Project Astoria.
Astoria currently provides a very early roadmap on how REST type Web services will be designed and deployed in the Microsoft world, providing a series of tightly integrated hooks to those points typically associated with RESTful services -- a browser and serverside data layer -- while staying in a symbiotic relationship with other Microsoft developments in this space, namely Silverlight as a browser environment, Visual Studio as a development platform,and the .NET framework on the serverside.
