Richardson Maturity Model

A model (developed by Leonard Richardson) that breaks down the principal elements of a REST approach into three steps. These introduce resources, http verbs, and hypermedia controls.

18 March 2010

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Consumer-Driven Contracts: A Service Evolution Pattern

by Ian Robinson

This article discusses some of the challenges in evolving a community of service providers and consumers. It describes some of the coupling issues that arise when service providers change parts of their contract, particularly document schemas, and identifies two well-understood strategies - adding schema extension points and performing "just enough" validation of received messages - for mitigating such issues. Both strategies help protect consumers from changes to a provider contract, but neither of them gives the provider any insight into the ways it is being used and the obligations it must maintain as it evolves. Drawing on the assertion-based language of one of these mitigation strategies - the "just enough" validation strategy - the article then describes the "Consumer-Driven Contract" pattern, which imbues providers with insight into their consumer obligations, and focuses service evolution around the delivery of the key business functionality demanded by consumers.

12 June 2006

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