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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-01T01:01:53+00:00

I am looking for good tools to support support changing the version of the

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I am looking for good tools to support support changing the version of the model used in REST services. My dream tools would do something like:

  • My pojo + version 1.0 config/transformer => Service available with 1.0 of my model
  • My pojo + version 1.1 config/transformer => Service available with 1.1 of my model

In my particular case I do not need to do the reverse transformation as my REST service will only provide lookup of data and never store stuff, but I don’t mind using a tool doing both:-)

A solution I am considering is adding custom annotations in my pojo (version + name) and make a code generator that will generate JSON/XML based on my pojo based on the version number. Though here I feel like I am re-inventing the wheel.

Edit:
Here is an example of a change that can be done from version 1 to version 1.1:

Version 1:
Person
firstname
lastname

Version 1.1
Person
firstname
lastname
birthdate

If you access the API with version 1.0 you do not get the birthdate attribute – it is only available in version 1.1. I want tool support for making these services available, where I can configure that granted that my pojo (which is currently like the 1.1 version), I want to make available a 1.0 version that does not show these values.

Other legal changes to the model could be to delete an attribute or to rename an attribute (or even rename an entity).

Edit 2:
Digital Joel mentioned in a comment that for a discussion on versioning the API you should go read https://stackoverflow.com/posts/9789756/.

The easy way out of versioning is ofcourse to not make backward breaking API changes, but business change so this is not always possible. My interest is on how to make these changes simpler to handle, therefore my question.

Edit 3:
I’ve looked for tools that might help the process, but still nothing that connects this in a good way with rest. Here are the links that I have found so far:

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    As mentioned in one answer, there may be no tools available for which does automatic versioning of APIs.

    We can address this challenge with two step approach :

    1) Versioning info of API
    There are many debates on best practice.
    two most popular are :

    (i) URI redesign - putting version info in URI like
http://something.com/v1.0/resource1/ or
http://something.com/resource1?ver=1.0

(ii) Using HTTP Header - putting version info in Accept/Content-Type
header keeping URI intact like 
#
GET /something/ HTTP/1.1 
Accept: application/resource1-v1.0+json

    2) Multiple versions of same pojo using json/xml library

    Once version info is with us we have to generate resource accordingly.
    There are many json and xml library with which we can maintain multiple versions of same pojo and serialize only required attributes based on version.
    Google gson java library works great in this. Check
    https://sites.google.com/site/gson/gson-user-guide#TOC-Versioning-Support

    public class Person{

@Since(1.0)
private String firstname;

@Since(1.0)
private String lastname;

@Since(1.1)
private String birthdate;

}
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