Microsoft .NET Architect and Evangelist Dave Wright gave delegates at AJAXWorld 2007 West today a sneak-peek at Project Astoria, a Microsoft incubation project to enable server applications to easily expose data as a service that can be consumed by AJAX clients across the Internet.

"We believe there's a sweet spot in the production of cloud data services," said Wright, who over a career that spans three decades in the computer industry,  has been deeply immersed in computing technologies as diverse as multimedia, data processing, decision support systems, content management, and Internet commerce.

Astoria Data Services exposes data, represented as Entity Data Model (EDM) objects, via web services accessed over HTTP. The data can be addressed using a REST-like URI. The Astoria service, when accessed via the HTTP GET method with such an URI, will return the data.

The web service can be configured to return the data in either plain XML, JSON or RDF+XML. In the initial release, formats like RSS and ATOM are not supported, though they may be in the future. In addition, using other HTTP methods like PUT, POST or DELETE, the data can be updated as well. POST can be used to create new entities, PUT for updating an entity, and DELETE for deleting an entity.