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API Design Patterns
book

API Design Patterns

by John J. Geewax
July 2021
Intermediate to advanced
480 pages
14h 40m
English
Manning Publications
Audiobook available
Content preview from API Design Patterns

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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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781617295850Publisher SupportPublisher WebsiteErrata Page