Astoria for Ajax

As we have said it from previous blogs, Ajax is a very complex program that requires experience and expertise in the world of programming. But there are different toolkits that you a programmer can use to make the programming a lot easier. Computer related companies came forward with these toolkits hoping to grab some followers.

Even though it’s not really a competition, the unseen hand of bragging to other companies that’s preferred is also another form of selling something not only to the consumers but also to various developers. If you have a good chunk of developers using you’re program, there’s a better chance that something more powerful that other programs will be realized. Keeping up with the competition is Microsoft Corporation’s Astoria.

The program was recently launched not as a web toolkit but as a service that could extract important data online. The program is still on its beta program but it has shown remarkable usage. Microsoft is planning to release the stable program with and sell them with Visual Studio 2008.

For now the beta program can be downloaded for free in the company’s official website. Astoria is formerly called Orcas. The main use of Astoria is to “access cloud data.” When you talk about cloud data, those are the information that you’ll be able to access online. Instead of creating the information using your server, information can be extracted from the available data in the internet. But there will be people saying that there’s a simple coding that you can just use to extract the program online.

Commands like, GET or PORT in the HTTP coding can easily be used to extract the information that we need to have in our website. If you have a simple website, you can easily use the coding and launch the website with the necessary information in no time. Astoria may be used in the same HTTP protocol however; it’s like using a grenade launcher to kill a small rat.

The functionality of Astoria may be so overwhelming it’s not practical to use them in HTTP. But if you consider using Ajax, you’ll definitely need something like Astoria to get these things done when it comes to Ajax.

As David Wright, Microsoft’s Architect put’s it this way, “All the AJAX technologies give you a way to abstract the UI…but they don't provide a common framework for accessing data.” So Astoria comes to the rescue to answer all of these concerns.

Astoria is perfect for programs that deal with data mining. Coupled with Ajax toolkits and frameworks, you’ll have more than enough programs to make a successful Ajax based site or program.

It’s going to be a good mush-up it the interface uses Ajax coding, framework will be provided by Microsoft and for the fun of it, using the Google Toolkit to place them all together.

But if you ask David Wright, you might want to go with Tibco's General Interface toolkit. Astoria will definitely increase the speed of program creation especially in data mining.