A comment on one of my earlier posts lead me to think of a feature that is missing from web services. The whole point of using web services is to decouple links between products so that it comes down to a service agreement. I think that these agreements should have a defind duration. This should be of the form “I promise to keep this service available for 3 years and I will update my future intentions after 2 years”. This could permit a web service to evolve over time without breaking the contract.
COM used to have immutable contracts – although these were occasionly broken ( OLE-DB has a great feature that breaks the IUnknown contract – the behaviour of IUnknown on a provider varies depending upon whether the connection is connected).
This would require some extensions to the basic infrastructure but would save a lot of trouble in the future. This would prevent a system being built with a dependance upon somrthing that is just due to expire.
Developer Rants 