"Things change over time. If everything is service based, how do we handle versioning of the services, without client disruption. When one applications suddenly requires different information, we can't update all of the other client applications just to accommodate the needs of the one. We also should not be duplicating services fo every client that needs something slightly different."Excellent question! There are myriad reasons to update a service, but only three major courses of action to follow. One of the three will be a best fit for each situation. Sometimes, things are just that easy. The options are few; because, the ultimate goal is to maintain integrity of the URLs. You simply don't want your service URLs changing, for many reasons into which I will not delve in this post. (If you are reading this post, you should know well enough to be nodding in agreement, anyway.)
To be clear, this post covers RESTful services, such as Web API, and not traditional WISDL-based Web Services or object serialization proxy services, like WCF. No, we're talking true REST.