Robert Steele

Relaxed Web Service Compatibility

Robert Steele, Takahiro Tsubono
University of Technology, Sydney

Abstract

If the widely anticipated benefits of Service Oriented Computing are to become a reality, the issue of maintaining the integrity of client applications in the event of alterations to called services must be fully addressed. The challenge to Service Oriented applications is illustrated by considering a pre-packaged application that makes use of a number of services - if any of these services are modified, this may potentially stop this already shipped application from working. Relaxed Web Service compatibility refers to enabling unaltered clients to continue to call services that have been modified, even for some service modifications that might have typically been labeled backwards incompatible. In this paper we introduce an architecture and approach for implementing relaxed Web service compatibility and describe its important implications for more robust Service Oriented Computing.