US Patent 7890659 Conforming web services to an updated contract

Example embodiments address current problems associated with changes in service contracts by providing automated mechanisms to update portions of an existing service implementation. For example, one mechanism modifies an implementation's skeleton (e.g., methods, method signatures, data structures, etc.) in order to conform to changes to an NPDL (e.g., WSDL) contract. In such an embodiment, the developer may only need to make the necessary changes, if any, to the business logic, which typically will not be known from the contract definition. Accordingly, such automatic modifications to the implementation facilitate a developer's adopting a contract based approach to web service development.