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 prefer the Salesforce.com method of versioning. Each version of the Web Services gets a distinct URL in the format of:

http://api.salesforce.com/{version}/{serviceName}

So you'll have Web Service URLs that look like:

http://api.salesforce.com/14/Lead

http://api.salesforce.com/15/Lead

and so on...

With this method, you get the benefits of:

1. You always know which version you're talking to.

2. Backwards compatibility is maintained.

3. You don't have to worry about dependency issues. Each version has the complete set of services. You just have to make sure you don't mix versions between calls (but that's up to the consumer of the service, not you as the developer).