Welcome to the June 2025 edition of the OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) newsletter! The newsletter aims to keep you in touch with what’s happening in the world of the OpenAPI, Arazzo, and Overlay specifications and our community.
Initiative News
Work on the OpenAPI Specification version 3.2 continues, with the specification team looking to bring all new features to a close very soon. As a reminder, version 3.2 features include:
- A new Tag Object format, with the ability to categorize and nest tags to create an expressive, hierarchical structure.
- Support for the QUERY HTTP method and additional custom HTTP methods.
- Extensive support and guidance for event streams, server-sent event streams, and sequential JSON.
- Enhanced multipart support.
- Enhanced XML support.
- Security changes such as support for Device Authorization Flow, a new property to signpost OAuth 2.0 Server Metadata and deprecated OAuth 2.0 schemes.
Alongside OpenAPI Specification development, Moonwalk continues to go into detail on the structure of OpenAPI, and how changes may be geared towards an effective representation of API, tuned for AI. The best place to find out how work is progressing is either joining the meetings, which you can find on the OAI Calendar, or head to GitHub Discussions, where you’ll find detailed meeting minutes that provide insights into the current state of the work.
All OAI specification teams welcome feedback from the community, which you can provide without necessarily raising a GitHub issue. Head over to OpenAPI, Arazzo, and Overlay GitHub Discussions to post anything you want to raise to the specification teams that doesn’t belong in the OAI Slack, or you want to discuss with a wider community.
Events News
We’ve had two OAI Tracks at Apidays since our last newsletter!
The OAI Track traveled to New York, where Erik Wilde led a variety of sessions ranging from bringing together OpenAPI and AsyncAPI through common JSON Schema reuse, great API design approaches, and the impact of AI on API design and utilization. Naturally, the theme of AI runs through all the conference agendas, and Frank Kilcommins covered elements of this in his talks in both New York and Apidays Helsinki in June, where “example mapping” by humans helps drive the activities and an AI in creating OpenAPI and Arazzo.
At both New York and Helsinki, the OAI Track has reflected on our efforts as a community in redefining member value, with a special focus at New York where we held a breakfast session to discuss ideas around how OAI member benefits might be evolved in the future. The New York saw Erik Wilde, Frank Kilcommins, Stu Waldron, and BGB Chair Budha Bhattacharya describe how members contribute to the development of OAI specifications. Members fund how OAI operates and are of critical importance to the health of our project. We are revisiting member value in 2025, which is discussed in more detail below.
Next the calendar we have the OSS Mini Summit in Denver on June 26, where we are running a community education session focusing on finding out more about OpenAPI, presented by Stu and Budha. We are also at Apidays Munich, where as usual, we have a packed agenda for the OAI Track, led by Erik and Frank. Highlights include a look at the value of semantic metadata by Marty Pitt and API Discovery “done right” by Felix Medam. We hope to see you there!
Ecosystem Spotlight
The release of Arazzo and Overlay at v1.0 in 2024 brought new opportunities for tool makers to create tools for the OpenAPI ecosystem. In this Ecosystem Spotlight, we’d like to highlight some of the tools available to help you develop Arazzo-based workflows and automation using Overlay.
For Arazzo we’ve seen a number of tools that help with visualizing Arazzo design, with an example coming from Symplr, which helps you to map out Arazzo flows in a graphical way. We mentioned Symplr in our last newsletter, but they have since released a blog post that discusses more about the tool, their approach, and the fundamentals of Arazzo.
Support for Overlay also continues to grow, with a list of supported tools currently being collated at the Overlay GitHub Repository. Current OAI members Bump.sh, Speakeasy, and IBM have all created tools or added support to existing tools for Overlays, and TSC member Lorna Mitchell has also created tools to help developers deal with repeated tasks when changed OpenAPI descriptions.
Finally…
As always, we are keen to hear from the community on what OAI can do for you. We are currently exploring what it means to be an OAI member, the benefits members receive, and how they can be enhanced to provide more opportunities for ecosystem engagement. If you are interested in this work, you can join the channel on Slack where you’ll find some of the proposals for change socialized to date. As part of this work, we are also especially interested in education and training needs, and whether OAI can do more to help you learn about our specifications. Knowledge and the application of the OAI specifications are vital for ecosystem health, and we are keen to promote education and training wherever we can.
If you have feedback or are interested in exploring any of the content in this newsletter further, please get in touch on the Outreach channel on Slack or email us at outreach@openapis.org.
Author: Chris Wood