Service Versioning Approaches in Service-Oriented Architecture:A Survey

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services are being critically considered by most organizations today. The adoption of SOA and Web services has gained momentum after the standardization of various aspects including management of change and interface versions. Services evolve dynamically to address the changing business context. This evolution leads to multiple service versions. Service versioning becomes a priority to minimize / eliminate the impact of changes made to the service, on the service consumer’s experience. Service versioning is an unavoidable reality, as the service provider cannot expect all service consumers to change every time a service changes, at least in the short-term. It is a challenging problem to manage services whose interfaces are changing, especially in the situation where the number of consumers for the service is significant. This paper addressed the problems of service versioning from the perspectives of both the service provider and the service consumer. It discussed the change management concerns, highlights the issues involved in service versioning and approaches to accomplish versioning successfully. It also discussed the architectural impact of versioning and the different techniques required to handle the impact. It presented web service notification, a solution for web service versioning, which would address difficulty of managing and governing such a large number of services on service-oriented architecture. An e-learning application was designed with web service notification and multiple versions that provides better flexibility and more reusability.