Chapter 34 

Facets and Versioning

34.1 Introduction

Facets provide a general-purpose mechanism for non-intrusively extending the type system of an application. This is particularly useful for versioning an application. Section 34.2 introduces the facet concept and presents the relevant APIs. Section 34.3 presents a few traditional approaches to versioning and their problems. Sections 34.4 to 34.6 show how to use facets to implement versioning, and Section 34.7 discusses design choices when adding versioning to a system.