A few days ago OData (Open Data Protocol) http://www.odata.org/ site is launched. OData is a web protocol for querying and updating data appliing technologie such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub), REST etc. Speaking of querying and updating the data over web gets me two years ago when I was talking about Astoria project at user group meetings and then I delivered a WinDays 2008 conference session about ADO.NET Data Services. What begins as project Astoria, change the name to ADO.NET Data Services now is known as WCF Data Services. All those names covers the same technology that really is HTTP/AtomPub REST way for sharing the data over web protocols.
What is connection beetween Astoria and OData and what WCF Data Services has to do with it?
Astoria and ADO.NET Services HTTP AtomPub dialect becomes a set of open extensions/conventions to AtomPub documented and were released under the OSP (Open Specification Promise) under the OData name. And simply said: in Astoria and ADO.NET Data Services messaging protokol was bound to those technologies and now has its own life while WCF Data Services are now Microsoft technology for implementing the OData protocol.
The benefit of opening the protocol as OData is collaboration with other platforms and the way it can be implemented by any platform that supports HTTP, XML and JSON. The first example is IBM Web Sphere under the list of OData producers - http://www.odata.org/producers - with Azure Tables, Sharepoint 2010 etc which could be expected.
On the consumers list - http://www.odata.org/consumers - is Excel for example and plenty of OData client libraries for different technologies: JavaScript, PHP, Java, Windows Phone 7, iPhone, .NET, Silverlight...
Seeing all gets Astoria beginings meaning and the time spended on working with it will be paid off in the future.