Service-Oriented Architecture expands the vision of web services, Part 1. In 221B.C., Emperor Qin unified several formerly warring states into a new country, which we now call China.
Perhaps one reason China has endured as a nation was Qin’s introduction of standards, which consolidated cultures and facilitated trade: a standard distance for wheels on carts which allowed them to travel efficiently on any road, a common written language that everybody could use to exchange messages (even if they did not speak the same language), and a strong defense against outside attacks (like the Great Wall of China). You could say that he developed the models for standardized transport, message exchange, and the firewall. In the same way, business integration of modern times has benefited from standards that enable heterogeneous computer systems to interoperate efficiently. These technologies are referred to, collectively, as web services.
Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures. Best practices for Web services versioning. The correct handling of API versioning has been one of the most difficult issues faced by developers of distributed systems.
Various schemes have been proposed, ranging from the laissez faire approach taken by CORBA to the stricter schemes used in DCOM. With the advent of Web services, there are some new features that you can take advantage of that can help alleviate the problem, but the brutal fact of the matter is that versioning has not been built into the Web services architecture.