End-to-End Versioning Support for Web Services

Abstract

Software services are, just like any other software system, subject to permanent change. We argue that these changes should generally be transparent to service consumers. However, currently consumers are often tied to a given version of a service and have no means of easily upgrading to a newer version. In this paper we propose a WSDL-driven classification of Web service change types and discuss a versioning mechanism for service-oriented systems that considers revision management on registry- and client-side. We use the concepts of service version graphs and selection strategies to provide transparent end-to-end versioning support, and show how this approach is implemented in our service-oriented computing runtime VRESCo. Furthermore, we illustrate the advantages of our approach in comparison to the current state of the art using a realistic case study.