Why Astoria alignment is not that trivial

re: Why Astoria alignment is not that trivial

mamund — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:17:06 GMT

SSDS-Astoria alignment is not only non-trivial, I'm not sure it's desirable.

My primary concern is that SSDS *not* become another participant in the Entity Framework system. You can improve the query model - and the support for multiple content types (Atom, RSS, JSON) without adopting the EDM pattern.

Keep SSDS lightweight and flexible.

re: Why Astoria alignment is not that trivial

ccchai — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:41:54 GMT

I don't see SSDS-Astoria alignment as important feature too. I wonder how many users require this feature....

Having said that, what is the future plan of SSDS-Astoria alignment? Existing interfaces will be obsolete? Everyone must move to Astoria interface? Data schema would become mandatory when using Astoria/SSDS? It seems to me the end results might reduce the flexibility of SSDS.....

re: Why Astoria alignment is not that trivial

Soumitra Sengupta — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:16:03 GMT

Thanks for the feedback.

First, Astoria alignment does not mean SSDS loses the flexible entity model. The idea is to provide the choice from one end of the spectrum (flex entities) to the other end of the spectrum (fully typed entities). As developers we want you to have the choice based on the application you are writing. We think there are scenarios that work well at the extremes and there are scenarios that are somewhere in the middle and could use schematized entites with flexible properties. So you are not losing the flexibility you are gaining a choice.

Second, we believe that there are scenarios where an application maybe built in the cloud and then migrated on-premise or vice versa. Providing symmetry between Astoria and SSDS gives us this symmetry and increases deployment choice for our customers. Aligning on the interaction model and the serialization formats gives us the ability to leverage the client side libraries and tools in .Net and VS.

Third, embracing EDM as a model and EF as a framework are 2 different things. Astoria for example uses the EDM model but does not use either EF or E-SQL.

This in short is our thinking at this time and we would like to hear if you think it makes sense.

re: Why Astoria alignment is not that trivial

mamund — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:42:26 GMT

SS:

Thanks for the reply here. It's good to hear that EDM and EF are not required together. That makes sense to me, too. Also, the notion of supporting both strong- and flex-typed entities is a positive.

I understand the value of the Astoria(AnDS) library and how it can make things easy for VS folks. I also want to encourage you to continue to think (as you indicate in your follow up post) about non-VS development (Ruby, Java, etc.). In that light, please also keep in mind C#/VB folks that will not be using Astoria.

Thanks again.

re: Why Astoria alignment is not that trivial

shan_mcarthur@spamcop.net — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 20:10:25 GMT

I do think that SSDS / Astoria need to integrate. That said, I think tha Astoria needs to grow up and allow for dynamic / flexible entities. I cannot believe it RTMed with a requirement of static entities.