24 Versioning and compatibility
This chapter covers
- What versioning is
- What compatibility means
- How to define backward compatibility
- The trade-offs involved in choosing a versioning strategy
- An overview of a few popular versioning strategies for web APIs
The software we build is rarely static. Instead, it tends to change and evolve frequently over time as new features are created and new functionality is added. This leads to a problem: how do we make these improvements without seriously inconveniencing users who have come to depend on things looking and acting as they did before? In this chapter, we’ll explore the most common mechanism for addressing this problem: versioning.
24.1 Motivation
Not only is software development rarely static, ...
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