Versioning is important, whether we are dealing with binary programming paradigms such as the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) of .NET run time or we are dealing with SOA infrastructures such as the ESB. However when it comes to SOA, versioning will have a slightly different meaning which I will try to describe in this section.
SOA is now the buzzword—people use it in every other context; everyone has their own beliefs and understanding. Whatever it is, autonomy becomes the prime concern in an SOA implementation. First, let us ask ourselves why we moved away from our old CORBA or our well-known Java RMI architectures for service implementation and consumption. Leaving aside all the varied definitions of SOA and the many advantages an SOA yields, autonomy is one of the best features SOA brings to the table of both the providers and consumers. Service providers can keep on changing their service implementations, either to add a new functionality...