A Versioned Approach to Web Service Evolution

• Autor(a) principal: Campinhos, João
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/20620
• topic: Software Variability; Web Services; Software Evolution; Versioning; Programming Languages; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática

Applications based on micro-services or web services have had a significant growth due to the exponential increase in the use of mobile devices whose applications rely almost entirely on this type of interfaces. However, using an external interface comes with no guarantees to the developers using it. Changes may be introduced at any moment, which can break the software that is using those APIs. It is necessary to give the consumers guarantees that their software will not break, but not at the expense of stagnating thedevelopment of said web service. In this document we present a programming model to evolve web services in a sustainable way and to automate most of the maintainability that might be required by the consumer. This model works by allowing multiple versions to be deployed, and then using a relation containing metadata to type check versions. By doing this, it is possible toguarantee type safety between all the versions to provide a sustainable way to evolve the service. A prototype framework was implemented in JavaScript, where it is possible to visualize the model working in an environment similar to what it is used in the industry nowadays. Finally we present a comparison of our prototype with the state of the art, thus demonstrating that our solution presents a viable method of evolution of web services.