Evolution Management of Enterprise Web Services

One of the challenges that enterprise service providers face is evolution management. In general, the challenge is to ensure the substitutability of enterprise Web service versions, i.e. correct functioning of all ongoing client applications relying on the old version of a service after the version has been substituted with a new one. Unfortunately, no currently available design approach can guarantee a perfectly extensible architecture that preserves full backward compatibility during its evolution. Hence, incompatibilities are very likely to occur if an old version of an enterprise service is replaced with a new one. This paper addresses evolution problem with regards to enterprise Web services. To elaborate on that different change drivers and types of changes of enterprise Web services are discussed in detail and overview of two service evolution management tools (versioning and message conversion) are presented.