Service Design Patterns: Fundamental Design Solutions for SOAP/WSDL and RESTful Web Services

Chapter 7. Web Service Evolution

Introduction

Service developers strive to maintain Backward Compatibility whenever a service is changed. This condition exists when the service can successfully process requests from clients that submit older versions of messages or media types. Backward compatibility also means that a client won’t break if the service returns a response using an updated data structure that the client may not fully comprehend. Services can also be Forward Compatible. A client may, for example, send “version 2” of a message, but the service may only know how to process data found in the first version because it hasn’t been altered to work with the newer message structure. This is a common occurrence when structures are defined ...