Release It!, 2nd Edition

Handle Others’ Versions

When receiving requests or messages, your application has no control over the format. None, zip, zero, nada, zilch. No matter how well the service’s expectations are defined, some joker out there will pass you a bogus message. You’re lucky if the message is just missing some required fields. Right now, we’re just going to talk about how to design for version changes. (For a more thoroughly chilling discussion about interface definitions, see ​Integration Points​.)

The same goes for calling out to other services. The other endpoint can start rejecting your requests at any time. After all, they may not observe the same safety rules we just described, so a new deployment could change the set of required parameters or apply ...