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The members of the OpenAPI Initiative Technical Steering Committee have announced the latest release of OpenAPI Specification 3.0.2. Note: This release is a patch release and none of these modifications change the behavior of the spec.

As a patch release, the latest changes were made to improve the specification in terms of readability and accuracy. Please read the release notes on on our GitHub repo here.

If you are interested in getting involved in the development of the spec, join us Thursday’s at 9a.m. Pacific for the public, open meetings of the Technical Steering Committee.

• Added clarification to case sensitivity of keys in maps.
• Reworked the Data Type table, removing the Common Name to reduce potential confusion.
• Clarified the description of the Server Variable Object’s default field.
• Fixed various examples.
• Clarified operationId is case sensitive.
• Clarified the default value of the Parameter Object’s deprecated field is false.
• Added recommendation to not use the Parameter Object’s allowEmptyValue field as it will be removed in a future version.
• Fixed the description of the Media Type Object’s schema field.
• Clarified the description of the Responses Object’s response codes field description.
• Clarified that the Schema Object’s additionalProperties field has a default value of true.
• Fixed a small wording issue in the Discriminator Object description.
• Fixed the Security Scheme Object description to include reference to the use of API Keys in cookies.
• Fixed the description of the Security Requirement Object.

The API Strategy & Practice Conference, known as APIStrat, is a conference focused on the API economy, and brings together experts, leaders, and members of the community to discuss what we each see on the ground every day. Happening September 24 – 26 in Nashville, Tennessee this is a conference you don’t want to miss.

We wanted to bring you the top reasons why we think you should attend the event. AND if you register today (September 14), you will save an addition $200 off of the conference. Don’t wait!

Here are the top reasons you’ll want to be at this event:

1. New Trends and Innovation in the API Space and Beyond: Along with learning the latest trends in the API space, you will also hear from speakers providing an expanded perspective of the technology world we live in today, including keynotes Virginia Eubanks, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY discussing Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor and Kate O’Neill, author of Pixels and Place and lead at KO Insights, discussing Tech Humanism: Integration, Automation, and the Future of the Human Experience.
2. Learn about best practices in the API space: The conference will uncover best practices when it comes to APIs as products, API portals, API design, and API usability. A few keynotes and talks include transforming the enterprise to an API platform; microservicing like a unicorn with Envoy, Istio and Kubernetes; and Evolving API: designing while requirements are still in flux. Come to the event and take away ideas that you can use right away!
3. Nashville, Tennessee: The music city of America has a lot of amazing things to do, see, and eat! There’s the classics like the Grand Ole Opry, Country Music Hall of Fame and The Station Inn for bluegrass music. Of course, there’s also plenty of fun walking tours if you are into food, drink, music, history and ghosts (every town has to have one)! Nashville is definitely a city on most folks bucket list, so get it checked off and attend an awesome conference too. And maybe you’ll even discover a rising star if you hit The Listening Room Cafe.
4. Hands-on workshops: If you are the type of person who learns by doing, there are a lot of amazing hands-on workshops that you can join from practical SecDevOps for APIs to turning external services into internal APIs. Whether you are an experienced API practitioner or just getting started, there’s a workshop for you.
5. Social Activities and Networking: One of the top choices to attend this event or any Linux Foundation event are the social activities that are provided to you, like our fun run (you can walk or jog too). Plus, this is a great place to network with your peers, many rate the hallway tracks at APIStrat as one of the top reasons to attend year after year.
6. Diversity and Inclusion: We want to make sure everyone feels welcome and safe at our conferences. We offer special items like a quiet room if you need a physical space where conversation and interaction is not allowed, a nursing room and child care as well as special communication stickers, and other features to make this event as accessible as possible.
7. OAS workshop: Among the awesome workshops that we have, we are also hosting a pair of unique OAS workshops. The beginner workshop is a hands-on introduction to the OpenAPI Specification 3.0. Directly following the intro session will be the OAS advanced users’ workshop and will conclude with what features are on the horizon. Attendees of these workshops will leave with a working knowledge of OASv3 which has become the defacto standard for describing APIs.

See the full lineup of speakers here and the register here.

Please join us for an advanced hands-on workshop on OpenAPI 3.0. Be sure to bring your own laptop to participate. This will be an OpenAPI Specification Technical Overview/Workshop.

A hands-on training session with more advanced features and 3.0 specific features, suitable for developers who already know v2 and want to know what’s new in the current version. Ends with a preview of the future release.

You will learn about:

1. Schema Objects
2. External References
3. Form Data
4. Links and Callbacks
5. Security Schemes
6. XmlExample

Ron Ratovsky

Swagger Developer Evangelist, SmartBear

Ron is the technical liason for the OpenAPI Initiative's Technical Steering Committee

Ted Epstein

RepreZen CEO

Ted Epstein, CEO of RepreZen, has been helping organizations succeed with API strategy and architecture for over 10 years. Ted participates in the OpenAPI Technical Design Community as a governing board member, and leads the architecture of RAPID-ML, the first API description language to bring the power of Domain-Driven Design to REST APIs. Ted is co-organizer of the API-Craft NYC Meetup and speaks at conferences including QCon, EclipseCon, APIStrat, API-Craft, and Data Modeling Zone.

Emmanuel Paraskakis

Sr. Director of Product Management, Oracle API Platform

Emmanuel has been working on delivering APIs for customers for over a decade and is a passionate member of the API Community. The last three years he has been crafting API tooling as part of Apiary, recently acquired by Oracle. Currently, he is heading up Product Management for Oracle’s API Platform, a full lifecycle suite of products for API Providers and Consumers. He is also the organizer for the API Craft San Francisco Meetup Group with over 1,000 members.

With APIStrat coming up in just under two weeks, I have been focusing on how the power of open source technologies can bridge disparate programming languages, and how the emergence – actual dominance – of the cloud has made it a requirement.

Are the problems my team faces common to anyone delivering developer tools for a cloud platform?

Many months ago, as I chatted with my ex-collegue David Justice, who has much the same responsibilities as myself (but for Microsoft Azure rather than Oracle Cloud), I realized that the problems my team faces at Oracle Cloud are common to anyone delivering developer tools for a cloud platform. My chat with David turned into a complex discussion of not just what our shared problems were — delivering developer tool support for constantly innovating cloud platforms in an ever-more-fragmented developer landscape — but also what our solutions to these problems were. Some commonalities in our solutions emerged, as well as some differences — with pros and cons to each of our approaches. We decided this discussion was a pretty informative one, and thought it might be useful to a wider audience. And so our APIStrat talk was born! — ‘Delivering Developer Tools at Scale: Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Perspectives’!

Deliver high-quality SDKs and documentation in real-time

In our talk at APIStrat, myself and David will discuss how to leverage the OpenAPI Specification and tooling, as well as the OSS community, to create huge productivity gains — whether you’re delivering a cloud, an app, or anything in between. We live in a cloud-paced world in which developers use a plethora of programming languages, frameworks, and DevOps tools. Like other applications, the cloud is powered by many ever-advancing REST APIs. Providing idiomatic experiences for developers in their languages of choice at the pace of service innovation is impossible without automation.

Have I caught your attention? If so, come learn how the Developer Experience teams at Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure deliver high-quality SDKs and documentation in real-time for Java, .NET, Python, Go, JavaScript, and Ruby, without breaking a sweat, at APIStrat. Looking forward to seeing you there!

This post was written by Joe Levy of Oracle Cloud

Joe Levy

Sr. Software Development Manager, Oracle

Joe Levy owns Developer Experience for Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure Services team, and previously worked on Microsoft Azure's Automation service. He has expertise in a variety of programming languages, both client and server-side, as well as in reverse engineering and computer security. He is a graduate of Duke University, with a degree in Computer Science. When not in front of a computer, he likes to do pub trivia, wipe out going off jumps on his skis, and compete in hackathons.

David Justice

Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft

David Justice is a Principal Software Engineer in Microsoft's Azure open source developer experience group. He leads code & documentation generation at scale using OpenAPI for Azure. David has lead the transformation of Microsoft's APIs from proprietary descriptions to public, open source OpenAPI specifications. Prior to his time at Microsoft, David was also an experienced startup founder of cisimple, a cloud based CI/CD for iOS and Android. In his spare time, you will likely find him working on Golang libraries on GitHub via https://github.com/devigned.

Today, eBay announced that they are leveraging the OpenAPI Specification (OAS) for all of its RESTful public APIs. With OpenAPI, developers can download an eBay OpenAPI contract, generate code and successfully call an eBay API in minutes. APIs play a critical role in eBay’s Developer Ecosystem helping the company build and deliver the best experiences to its buyers and sellers.

“The move to using the OpenAPI Specification was an unanimous choice given our needs and knowledge of the incredible ecosystem of developers that surround OpenAPI,” said Gail Frederick, GM of eBay Portland and VP Developer Ecosystem at eBay. “The OpenAPI Specification is the de facto standard for describing APIs and plays a critical role in the new microservices-based architecture at eBay.”

As a member and chairperson of the of the OpenAPI Initiative, I see more and more companies moving to distributed and microservice-based architectures as the need to build quality experiences for users and ship products or services to market faster is a linchpin to any business’ success. Technologies and tools created to support this transition are largely built from open collaboration, spanning application development technologies like Node.js to container orchestration like Kubernetes. Since APIs are the “glue” between distributed components, the OAS standard plays a central part in this transition.

This was definitely the case with eBay. As eBay transitioned from a monolithic and centralized architecture to a distributed microservice architecture, the company needed to evolve the way service contracts were explored, tested, published, and integrated with API specifications.

The company had a set of needs for this transition:

API contracts would need to meet the needs of seamless exploration and integration across a diverse technology stack, be industry standard, and be feature rich to complement our Technical Standards and governance models necessitated the exploration for a new specification.

The primary criteria was a specification that was both human and machine readable, language agnostic, vendor-neutral, and open source.

• Shekhar Banerjee, Senior MTS Architect, eBay

OAS became the unanimous choice due to its tooling support, fully customizable stack, code-first and contract-first approaches to API development, and most importantly because OpenAPI continues to evolve as a standard led by open collaboration from the OpenAPI Initiative. The move to OAS furthers eBay’s mission to its Developer Ecosystem to promote developer efficiency and productivity with no more SDKs and no more hours spent writing API client code.

eBay has been a member of the OpenAPI Initiative since August 2017 and one of the first in the industry to publish contracts based on OpenAPI 3.0 specification. We are very excited to see eBay’s continued support of our consortium, as well as other open collaboration projects, including the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). We look forward to sharing more around eBay’s success with OAS as well as the many users and members that make up our ecosystem during API Strategy & Practice Conference happening September 24 – 26 in Nashville, Tennessee. Learn more about this conference here, and keep up-to-date with news coming out of the OpenAPI Initiative here.