A Lightweight Solution to Version Incompatibility in Service-Oriented Revision Control Systems

Service-Oriented Revision Control (SORC) is a novel distributed Software Configuration Management (SCM) model specifically designed for effectively supporting collaborative programming of Web applications, where each developer's code is exposed to their peers as Web services. As developers often work on their services in a continuous and evolutionary manner, newer versions of the same service are constantly created and as such incompatibility between versions becomes a major issue in service versioning that leads to hurdles in the interactions between the service provider and its consumers. In this paper, we propose a lightweight solution to version incompatibility in SORC by allowing the service provider to automatically generate a compatibility message when committing a new version, which is to be retrieved by consumers when updating their local proxies to the service without relying on heavyweight service registries.