MANAGING SOFTWARE COMPONENT VERSIONS WITHIN A SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE

In one embodiment the present invention includes a method for managing versions of various software components in a service-oriented architecture. A software component representing a service provider includes a message dispatcher to analyze a service request message received from a service consumer, and to determine whether the service request message specifies version mapping information. If the message does include version mapping information, a conversion algorithm is selected based on the version mapping information specified in the service request message. The message is then converted according to the selected conversion algorithm before being processed by the processing logic of the service provider. A service reply message is similarly converted before being sent to the service consumer.