Patent ID: 8037025

Claim:
A method for hosting versioned web services, comprising steps of: using an information processing device for producing: a description of service interface characteristics of a web service, wherein the service interface characteristics include operations, parameters, results, and behavior of the interface; an implementation version for supporting an interface version, said implementation version comprising version metadata describing the supported interface version supported and any set of other compatible supported interface versions; and a service proxy for a version group, wherein the service proxy is a local gateway to a collection of implementation versions of the web service and provides a target destination for service interface requests for all versions of the web service; receiving a service interface request from a service requestor, the request comprising: version metadata describing a supported interface version and any set of other compatible supported interface versions for the web service, wherein said supported interface version describes and applies to a service interface operations, parameters, and results of the web service; parsing the service interface request; extracting the version metadata from the parsing step; invoking a version management controller, through its version mapping application program interface, to determine a correct target and to parse the service request; dynamically mapping the supported interface version from the extracted version metadata to a implementation target version at a target destination; and dynamically routing the service interface request to the target destination.