APIs as infrastructure: future-proofing Stripe with versioning
I work on a SOA team at a large healthcare enterprise. We currently write mostly SOAP APIs (yeah, I know, 2017 and all that...), and follow a typical pattern as what Stripe describes: Whenever we do a version bump (which is extremely frequent, since a WSDL breaks a contract the moment you sneeze at it), we create an XSLT transform from the new version back to the old. So if you're calling version 2, but the current version is 10, there will be transforms back for 10->9, 9->8, 8->7... all the way back to 2. It works well enough.We're in the early stages of deploying a new RESTful stack, and versioning is a hot topic (along with getting people out of the RPC mindset and into a resource-based paradigm). While version bumps should be much less common, we'll probably end up doing something similar to our cascading transformations. Essentially, the old version becomes a consumer of the new version, and as long as the new version continues to hold to its API contract, everything should work with minimal fuss. Of course, that's assuming that we don't change the behavior of a service in ways that aren't explicitly defined in the API contract...