WSDL-temporal: An approach for change management in web services

Web services are self-describing, open components that support rapid, low-cost composition of distributed applications. They are being considered as the best choice of industry to provide solution for multiple clients scattered in heterogeneous environment. However, change in the business requirements result in multiple versions of Web services. Maintaining variety of versions is difficult especially for organizations, with established products and a large customer base. The problem aggregates even more when a product requires customization for its clients with minor differences in each version. This forces to deploy multiple Web services for each one of them. This work presents WSDL-Temporal, an extension of WSDL to handle issues related to change management in Web Service. The approach allows maintaining multiple versions of interfaces/operations/elements within a single Web service that can be accessed by clients. The paper extends the case study of W3C specification of WSDL to present WSDL-Temporal approach of change management. Not only does WSDL-Temporal handle changes but is also capable of handling both backward compatible and incompatible changes. Another advantage of using a single WSDL-T service for service producers is that they can now push required changes to the production environment more frequently and need not to accumulate a set of changes for next release. It also enables the service providers to deprecate or retire services in a graceful manner.