Blog

Here comes a quick update on the ongoings within the OAI:

New Members

There is an ongoing interest in joining the OAI and we are thrilled to welcome two new members to the group:

• Apiary: creators of API design and collaboration tools that recently announced support for Swagger / OpenAPI Spec.
• Atlassian: the people behind JIRA, Confluence, HipChat, Bamboo, etc.

If your organisation is interested in joining the OAI to support the evolution and proliferation of the OpenAPI Specification then please have a look at https://openapis.org/join for details on how to do so.

Initial TDC Memberships and process finalized

The initial members of the Technical Developer Community driving the OpenAPI Specification have been decided on;

• Darrel Miller – @darrel_miller
• Jason Harmon – @jharmn
• Jeremy Whitlock – @whitlockjc
• Marsh Gardiner – @earth2marsh
• Ron Ratovsky – @webron
• Tony Tam – @fehguy

This list of contributors is maintained at on GitHub in line with the OAI charter.

The process for the evolution of the specification has been published by the TDC at https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification/blob/OpenAPI.next/DEVELOPMENT.md

OpenAPI Spec 3.0 work progresses

Work on the next major iteration of the specification has started, and discussions on various features/improvements are in progress on corresponding issues at GitHub. If you’re interested in getting informed or involved here are a couple of links to point you in the right direction:

• The OpenAPI.next branch on GitHub
• The list of proposed issues for the next version

OAI represented at events

The OAI will be represented by our members at two upcoming OW2 events in Europe:

• Cloud Computing World Expo, Paris, 23-24 March – Represented by Restlet
• Cloud Expo Europe, London, 12-13 April – Represented by 3Scale

The OAI is currently evaluating it’s possibilities to participate in upcoming API-related events around the globe; if you’re organising an event where you would like the OAI to be represented or if you’re interested in organising a local OAI/OpenAPISpec meetup that the OAI can sponsor – please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Other ongoing activities

• We have assigned an internal workgroup to provide guidelines on usage of the OAI logo and mark – these will be published on our website.
• The OpenAPI Specification now has a twitter account at https://twitter.com/openapispec – follow it to get notified of both OAI and OpenAPI-Spec related news.

That’s it for now – please don’t hestitate to get in touch with the TDC on GitHub if you’re interested in participating in the technical discussions around the OpenAPI Specification – or with the OAI members via our contact form if you have general inquiries – we look forward to hearing from you.

/Ole Lensmar
@olensmar

Amidst the general ongoing end-of-year activities, the OAI has been busy getting all the initial pieces into place for 2016. The meetings we’ve had within the group during last December have resulted in the following:

1. OADF renamed to “OpenAPI Specification”

The initially suggested name for the harbored specification was OADF (“Open API Definition Format”) – a name that seemingly begged to be replaced by something catchier; the members of the OAI have decided on “OpenAPI Specification” (abbreviated to “OAS”) to be the new name going forward.

2. Swagger Specification repository moved to the OAI on GitHub

The Swagger 2.0 specification repository has consequently been moved from its original location under the swagger-api organization on GitHub to the new OAI organization with the name “OpenAPI Specification” – https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification.

The specification itself has not been changed at this point to not break any existing tooling that works with Swagger 2.0 definitions. The next release of the OAS will deprecate any usage of the term “swagger” in the specification in favor of an OAS-specific term; the TDC will be responsible for the implementation of this transition.

The OAS will continue to be licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.

3. New OAI members 

The interest for joining the OAI after its initial launch has been overwhelming  – and we are happy to welcome the following companies to the group;

• APInf – of https://apinf.io/
• Mashape – https://www.mashape.com/

If you or your organization is interested in joining the OAI please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the OAI at https://openapis.org/join.

4. New OAI leadership is taking form

The OAI charter designates 3 entities that form its governing structure:

1. The board of members which set the charter for the group as a whole and manages non technical tasks
2. The Technical Developer Committee (TDC) that is responsible for the actual technical work on evolving the OAS
3. The Technical Oversight Board (TOB) that resolves any conflicts in the TDC and makes sure that the TDC delivers in line with the OAIs core values.

The formation for the TDC and TOB is still in progress; as for now the following persons have been elected:

• TDC members: <still in progress>
• TOB members:
  • Elected by OAI members: Tony Tam, Ron Ratovsky, Jason Harmon
  • Elected by TDC members: <still in progress>
• OAI Chairman: Ole Lensmar

Next Steps

As the OAI is starting to take shape we have the following on our agenda:

• Finalize the TDC and TOB memberships
• Start work on the next version of the OAS within the TDC
• Decide on which non-technical activities the OAI can engage in to facilitate the further evolution of OAS and its adoption within the industry

I’m obviously very excited about what we have ahead of us – the industry momentum behind APIs isn’t showing any signs of slowing down and the need for a common language for API definitions is evident as businesses strive to maximize their usage of APIs to provide value to their end-users.

Happy New Year!

/Ole Lensmar