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:
- The board of members which set the charter for the group as a whole and manages non technical tasks
- The Technical Developer Committee (TDC) that is responsible for the actual technical work on evolving the OAS
- 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