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Postman Joins the OAI to Support the OpenAPI Specification

By July 23, 2020Announcement, Blog

This blog post was contributed by Kin Lane, Chief Evangelist, Postman

When Postman launched its API builder last year, we were amazed to see how popular OpenAPI was with our users, when it came to designing and developing APIs. Our usage stats helped us realize just how important the OpenAPI Specification is to how our customers design and build their APIs. Today Postman is joining the OpenAPI Initiative in order to work with the 35 other OAI members to steer the specification forward. Together we will hope to continue to support open source tooling that builds on the specification and to grow a stronger OpenAPI community so as to ensure the future of this important industry standard. 

Historically, Postman collections were how API providers defined their APIs on the platform. With the introduction of the API builder, more API providers began using OpenAPI as the central definition of each API being developed. Over the years, Postman collections have evolved to allow developers to test, mock, document, and automate parts of the API lifecycle. Along with this evolution, each collection can be generated from an OpenAPI, pushing us to deliver a growing number of specific capabilities that help our customers leverage OpenAPI as the API contract for use across their API operations:

  • Import – You can import an OpenAPI document into the Postman and maintain it as the central contract for each individual API, which is used to validate and notify developers when documentation, collections, or tests are out of sync with the OpenAPI contract.
  • Generate – You can generate Postman collections from your OpenAPI definition, establishing derivatives of your API contracts for use in documenting, mocking, and testing your APIs in an ongoing fashion across regions.
  • Validate – Every collection generated from an OpenAPI specification can be validated across the OpenAPI contract, helping keep documentation, mock servers, and testing infrastructure in alignment across operations.
  • GitHub sync – When you are managing your OpenAPI document in Postman using the API Builder, you can sync it to GitHub, allowing it to be used in other systems, allowing changes to occur in Postman or via other tools.

OpenAPI has become part of the API factory floor for Postman customers. Beyond what a spec describes, Postman makes it easier to work with APIs by allowing you to store tokens or keys for multiple profiles or lifecycle stages and to augment with specific values for running tests or for monitoring. The OpenAPI Specification provides a way to define what is possible with HTTP APIs, with Postman collections emerging as a way to define, execute, and automate each stop along that APIs lifecycle. A stronger relationship between OpenAPI and Postman has helped our customers, and we’re thrilled to be joining the conversation about what the OpenAPI roadmap might be, and to help realize the full benefits of using OpenAPI across the API lifecycle.