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Version Number Anti-Patterns

After the gang of four (GOF) Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides published the book, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, learning how to describe problems and solutions became popular in almost every field in software development. Likewise, learning to describe don’ts and anti-pattern became equally as popular. 

In publications that discussed these concepts, we find helpful recommendations for software design, project management, configuration management, and much more. In this article, I will share my ideas about version numbers for software artifacts.

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REST-API Versioning Strategies

REST-API Versioning Strategies

Abstract

The approach to managing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for distributed heterogeneous systems differs from the classic tools as offered by Apache Maven, which is designed to simplify build processes for the assembly of technologically and homogeneously similar artifacts. The limitations of such a classic dependency management tool become evident in the context of managing APIs between technologically different and independent systems, where APIs such as the Representational State Transfer (REST-APIs) ensures their networking capabilities, for instance.

The mutual contract between a service provider, which might offer a few API versions implemented, and its consumers, plays a critical role and thus demands another approach to guarantee the contract by design in operation for a prolonged period. Moreover, the semantic versioning as used by Apache Maven by differentiating three digits would be unrealistic for REST-APIs.

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Go vgo: A Look at User Needs

What do users need from their package dependency management? A lot has already been written on this including the output from a survey of Go developers, a specification for a dependency management tool by those who studied the issue and possible solutions, a series on vgo by Russ Cox, and even follow-upposts by Sam Boyer, one of the dep maintainers. With so many words already written, what more do people need to consider?

When Sam Boyer recently quoted Alistair Cockburn in his write-up on MVS failure modes I realized we aren't all thinking of people the same way. Dependency management tools are there to aid people. Who are these people and what do they need and want?