On synchronizing with web service evolution

Abstract

To catch up with today's fast changing business markets, web services has never slowed down its paces for evolution. As a consequence, service consumers have to employ in-time upgrades to guarantee continuous business integrity and avoid unnecessary runtime errors in their IT systems. However, a new web service release can involve hundreds of changes, and thus it is non-trivial for the service consumer to rapidly track and adopt relevant changes. This paper proposes a framework for facilitating the service consumer to keep synchronized with the web service evolution. On the service side, a Service Invocation Monitor is installed to monitor the interaction history of the client, a Service Delta Analyzer exports the service delta into well-formatted document, and a Release Note Customizer is configured to customize the full release note produced using the monitored interaction history and exported service delta. On the client side, the Consumer Code Customizer is used by the consumer developer to highlight the code fragments to be changed and provide facilitation linkages between the code fragments and the customized release note. An example is shown to demonstrate the usefulness of our proposal. © 2008 IEEE.