We had heard the word “Change” used a lot in the recent months and I have to agree that “There is nothing more permanent than change”. In the services world, “Change” brings about a unique challenge – “Versioning”. As I enhance my service to add new functionality or update existing logic, I need to create a new version of the service. The reason - Most often, I need to support multiple versions of the same service in my environment as I might have different clients who would like to use different versions of the service.
WebSphere Services Registry and Repository (WSRR) is the place where I store all my service definitions. WSRR allows me to define a version number for a service, i.e. I could have multiple versions of the same service in WSRR.
However what is missing in WSRR is the ability to connect multiple versions of the service. However what WSRR does provide is the flexibility to add metadata to service definitions. I have created two such relationship attributes called – nextVersion and previousVersion and have used them to build a custom way to link multiple versions of a service.
Such a custom relationship allows me to do an impact analysis in my registry to see the following results:
Rajiv Ramachandran first joined Prolifics as a Consultant, and is currently the Practice Director for Enterprise Integration. He has 11 years experience in the IT field — 3 of those years at IBM working as a developer at its Object Technology Group and its Component Technology Competency Center in Bangalore. He was then an Architect implementing IBM WebSphere Solutions at Fireman’s Fund Insurance. Currently, he specializes in SOA and IBM’s SOA-related technologies and products. An author at the IBM developerWorks community, Rajiv has been a presenter at IMPACT and IBM's WebSphere Services Technical Conference.
