EXTENSIBLE ARCHITECTURE FOR VERSIONING APIS

Some large software development projects need more than one versioning system to accommodate not only a diversity of document formats and data types, but also the geographic diversity of its programmers. However, having more than one versioning system is generally very expensive. A major factor in this expense is the requirement for a separate application program interface (API) for each separate versioning system. Accordingly, the inventors devised an exemplary API architecture that can be extended with “plug-in”protocol providers to include virtually any number of separate version stores or versioning systems. The exemplary architecture includes a generic command parser and a command dispatcher. The command dispatcher operatively couples to one or more protocol providers, each coupled to at least one version store. Inclusion of the OLE DB-compliant interface and the command parser in the exemplary embodiment saves the protocol providers the effort and expense of replicating these features, thereby reducing the cost of adding version stores.