Interface Design and Versioning Framework

Harmonia Inc., in partnership with Raytheon, will design, prototype, and demonstrate a technical and governance Harmonization Framework (HF) to design and version Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) interfaces. HF addresses a fundamental SOA problem: even though SOA may start with a coherent overall architecture driven by a business case, the coherency can be lost with poor service interface design compounded by erratic version evolution. HF counters with seven innovative components to coordinate the evolution of services providers and clients at design time, but also to allow clients to detect when a service provider makes changes unilaterally at run-time. The seven innovations are: design for extensibility and control via governance; a design decision tool to visually analyze the structure and behavior as well as validate the global impact of design decision points; a coordination protocol by which providers can propose, solicit comment, and roll out services in orderly fashion; registry-based version change notification to communicate changes; fingerprinting to detect when a provider makes a unilateral change; experimental exploration of change impact; and reducing the cost of up-front design for extensibility by providing guaranteed backward versioning compatibility through a chain of adaptors.