A Version-aware Approach for Web Service Client Application

An increasing number of enterprises demonstrate that successful adoption of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) using Web services technologies enables them to build enterprise applications quickly and effectively. To align with changing business requirement, services need to adapt quickly, and eventually multiple versions of the same original service would coexist. To manage all these versions and ensure continuous availability to the service consumers, innovative techniques of version management for Web services become critical to realizing the full promise of SOA. To address the version management issues in Web services, we propose to include version-awareness to various aspects of web services as an extension to the current SOA. In particular, to minimize the impact of service changes on the service consumer side, we design a version-aware web service client model (via an enhancement to the current JAX-RPC client model) which provides both consumer-aware and consumer-transparent invocation styles at build-time and dynamic service proxy generation at runtime. Leveraging the present implementation of the JAX-RPC service model, the Versioned Client APIs based on the new client model is designed to make the development process easy and intuitive. A prototype of this client model, implemented in Eclipse with an exemplary weather-forecast application, is introduced to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach.