Welcome to the OpenAPI Initiative August 2024 Newsletter, our regular round-up of the latest stories from across the OpenAPI landscape. It’s vacation season in the northern hemisphere, but there is plenty of news to share!
Initiative News
Our Arazzo Specification was announced in our last newsletter which, in case you missed it, is a description language that allows API providers to describe sequences of API calls, both within one API or across various APIs. The arrival of Arazzo has created a significant buzz in the community, with a great deal of interest in how Arazzo can meet many use cases.
To help introduce Arazzo we’ve started another initiative, our OpenAPI Hangouts series! We held our first OpenAPI Hangout on 30th July 2024, where Budha Bhattacharya, Frank Kilcommins, Lorna Mitchell, and Erik Wilde discussed Arazzo in detail. If you missed the Hangout, please watch the video on the event page. Keep an eye open for future OpenAPI Hangouts by following us on LinkedIn.
We also took a detailed look at Arazzo through a real use case, namely for API consumers implementing a buy-now, pay-later (BNPL) solution in their e-commerce solution. While the BNPL API and platform in our use case are examples they accurately represent the complexity of such e-commerce orchestration and workflow requirements. You can discover more about the full BNPL example on our blog.
Specification News
Our Specification website has recently undergone a revamp. All versions of the OpenAPI Specification are now provided through this page, together with v1.0.0 of Arazzo. We hope these changes will provide a focused, “one-stop” solution for readers of our Specifications.
Work continues on multiple releases of the OpenAPI Specification. We now have several releases in-flight, with 3.0.4, 3.1.1, 3.2, and 4.0 coming down the tracks.
3.0.4 and 3.1.1 are patch releases that make OAS 3.0 and 3.1 much clearer without adding any new requirements. We’ve expanded and improved explanations of parameter serialization, discriminators, reference resolution, and more. We’ve also updated our citations of security standards and improved the consistency and clarity of our wording throughout the specification.
3.2.0 will be an incremental step towards “Moonwalk” that will be strictly compatible with 3.1. Our goal is to introduce a few Moonwalk improvements along with other small fixes that will be easy for tooling providers to implement in the near future. This will help bridge the gap to the eventual release of 4.0.
Work on OpenAPI 4.0, codenamed Moonwalk, also continues apace under the auspices of the Moonwalk Special Interest Group (SIG). You can catch up with latest developments on Moonwalk Discussions, where we publish discussion points from each meeting.
Our specification meetings are, of course, open to anyone. If you want to join to listen in or contribute, you’ll find the meetings in the OAI calendar.
Community News
We recently announced our Community Heroes feature, which profiles an invaluable member of the OpenAPI community. Our second Community Hero is Frank Kilcommins, Principal API Technical Evangelist at SmartBear, who has been instrumental in creating the Arazzo Specification.
Please read more about Frank on our blog. Also let us know if you have any suggestions for a future Community Hero and we’ll do our best to feature them!
Events Round-up
Conference season is also about to ramp up again and we’ve got several OAI tracks and sessions in the pipeline.
Apidays London – 18th – 19th September, 2024
Our next event will be apidays London, where Erik Wilde will host our OAI track. The theme of apidays London is “APIs for Smarter Platforms and Business Processes”, and will focus on how AI and APIs act as enablers for businesses. Our OAI track will therefore look at standards and practices in the OpenAPI ecosystem that act as enablers for business. We’ll hear from Frank Kilcommins with an update on Arazzo, Lorna Mitchell on API governance, and Gobe Hobona on API standardization for geospatial ecosystems.
Nordic APIs Platform Summit – 7th – 9th October, 2024
The Nordic APIs Platform Summit is held in Stockholm in October each year and offers a wealth of experiences and perspectives across the API economy. OAI is offering an OpenAPI Fundamentals workshop at the Summit, with the content based on our Linux Foundation course. The workshop will be led by Budha Bhattacharya and Chris Wood, and will be an “ask me anything” format to provide you with deep insights on your target topics. Please follow the link to register.
Event Outlook
We are planning OAI tracks at the following events:
- apidays Australia, 16th – 17th October, 2024
- apidays Paris, 3rd – 5th December, 2024
Finally…
That’s it for this newsletter. If you are in the northern hemisphere we hope you are having a great summer!
If you have any news you want to share with the OpenAPI community please get in touch by email or join the Outreach channel on Slack. We also welcome suggestions on how we can improve this newsletter or bring you information that can help make the most of how you use specifications published by the OpenAPI Initiative.