What are your WebService Versioning best practices?

Question

We have 2 separate products that need to communicate with each other via web services. What is the best-practice to support versioining of the API?

I have this article

Answer 1

I think something else to keep in mind is your client base, are you publishing this service publicly, or is it restricted to a set of known agents?

I'm involved in the latter situation, and we've found it's not that difficult to solve this via simple communication / stakeholdering.

Though it's only indirectly related to your question, we've found that basing our versioning number on compatibility seems to work quite well. Using A.B.C as an example...

• A: Changes which require recompilation (breaks backwards compatibility)
• B: Changes which do not require recompilation, but have additional features not available without doing so (new operations etc.)
• C: Changes to the underlying mechanics that do not alter the WSDL