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ASC 2022 in San Francisco 🌉 by the Numbers

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This year’s API Specifications Conference (ASC), organized by the OpenAPI Initiative, set a record for submissions for talks, won the CHAOSS Gold badge for Diversity and Inclusion, was rated excellent or above by 95% of the attendees, and was an excellent networking opportunity and… was just plain a lot of fun!

ASC 2022 was held in person in South San Francisco, California, from September 19 – 21. Due to Covid restrictions and as a precaution the conference was held virtually for the past two years. This year, it was hybrid. No matter the format, the conference continues to be extremely popular and showcases developers, users, companies, organizations, API tool makers and more, all interested in API technology.

It was a real thrill hearing from and interacting with industry experts discussing topics such as OpenAPI Specifications, RAML, Blueprint, gRPC, OData, JSON, Schema, GraphQL, AsyncAPI, and other formats. 

Recordings are available here (on-site) and here (virtual).

 The full Linux Foundation report on ASC 2022, “Transparency Report: API Specifications Conference (ASC),” (PDF) is available for download.

The ASC 2022 received the CHAOSS Gold badge, a Linux Foundation project, for the second year in a row! The CHAOSS Gold badge was awarded because ASC 2022 met greater than or equal to 80% of requirements in the open source community that fosters healthy Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) practices.

Other inclusion efforts included: Offering onsite resources like a quiet room if you need a physical space where conversation and interaction are 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.

The Keynote speakers presented on a wide variety of API topics including Near Realtime, Autogenerated API Specs for Fun and Profit by Jean Yang, CEO Akita Software; Building APIs at Scale: Moving from API Governance to API Stewardship by Mike Kistler & Mark Weitzel;  Microsoft, the Retrospective Panel moderated by Kin Lane, Postman and including Lorinda Brandon, BetterCloud and including Gareth Jones, Microsoft, Ole Lensmar, Kubeshop, Tanya Vlahovic, Salesforce; and The Spec At Twitter by Daniele Bernardi, Twitter. 

Special thanks to Frank Kilcommins, API Technical Evangelist, SmartBear, for welcoming and giving the Opening Remarks.


Attendance by the numbers!

The survey conducted after the conference showed that 95% rated the content as great or excellent (4 or above on a scale of 1-5) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️! 45% of attendees say they attended ASC 2022 as a valuable way to meet people in the industry or network.

We had an attendance of 123 people from 17 countries.🌎

Record CFP Submissions! 🔥

The API Specifications Conference (ASC) 2022 received 111 CFP submissions, compared to 104 in 2021, 72 in 2020, and 42 in 2019. A team of peer reviewers accepted 44 sessions. Program Chair, Frank Kilcommins of SmartBear, along with the planning committee, carefully curated content and the keynote lineup bringing the most relevant topics and talks to this year’s event.

For those that missed the conference or would like to watch the event again, the keynote and session recordings are available on our YouTube Channel.

Download the full Linux Foundation report on ASC 2022 here: “Transparency Report: API Specifications Conference (ASC)” (PDF) is available for download.

First Time Ever! OpenAPI Track at APIDays Paris – Join us!

By Blog, Events

The OpenAPI Initiative is hosting an OpenAPI track at APIDays Paris on December 14, 2022. 

To register, see: https://www.apidays.global/paris#agenda 

As a member of the OAI community, you can register with a complimentary pass using the code OAI20. Only 20 are available, so don’t wait!

This all-day track focused on OpenAPI Specification issues is a first and will include a wide variety of API topics of interest to both developers and managers. It is intended to become a series of one-day events at APIDays events planned for 2023. 

View Full Schedule

The goal of the OpenAPI track is to bring API practitioners together and share real-world experiences. How are you using the OpenAPI Specification in your company? What are the main strengths and weaknesses? At the end of the track, we will meet to discuss the specification, its evolution, and where it is headed. We will gather feedback from you to bring back to the OpenAPI initiative. 

If you are using the OpenAPI Specification in your company and have something to share, please make sure to attend the Community Feedback OpenAPI session starting at 16:55.

The day includes presentations from Isabelle Mauny, Co-Chair at OpenAPI Initiative, on The State of OpenAPI; from Steve Swartz, Principal Architect at Cisco, on The 12 Facets of the OpenAPI Specification; from Beppe Catanese, Developer Advocate at Adyen, covering From API Specifications to Code with OpenAPI; and from Mario Bodemann, Developer Evangelist at Deutsche Telekom, on OpenAPI: Building an Android Parser and Tester App… and many more!

 

👋 Come join us! To register, see: https://www.apidays.global/paris#agenda

Cisco Joins OpenAPI Initiative

By Blog

OpenAPI Initiative continues strong pace of membership growth; 45 current members include Atlassian, Bloomberg, eBay, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Postman, SAP, SmartBear, and many more

SAN FRANCISCO – October 18, 2022 – The OpenAPI Initiative, the consortium of forward-looking industry experts focused on creating, evolving, and promoting the OpenAPI Specification (OAS), a vendor-neutral, open description format for RESTful APIs, is announcing today that Cisco has joined as a new member.

As a catalyst in community-powered innovation in cloud native development, AI/ML, API security, connectivity, observability, network automation, and more, Cisco believes that standardizing Web APIs throughout the cloud will provide transparency and value across the global open source and cloud native community ecosystem. Cisco sees the advantages of implementing the OpenAPI Specification to address cloud native challenges, reduce implementation costs, and support the next generation of visionaries through open source.

“Well-built components are a core consideration in shipping powerful applications and platforms,” said Stephen Augustus, Head of Open Source, Cisco. “Cisco is thrilled to join esteemed partners in the OpenAPI Initiative to drive innovation and wider adoption of the OpenAPI Specification as a fundamental component for robust, interoperable applications.”

“We are excited to welcome Cisco to the OpenAPI Initiative. Cisco is active with many open source and Linux Foundation projects, so it is a natural fit, and we look forward to working more closely with them to build the OpenAPI Specification,” said Kevin Swiber, Marketing Chair, OpenAPI Initiative and API Lifecycle Integration Specialist at Postman. “Our membership is open to anyone who understands the immense value of standardizing APIs and is interested in evolving and promoting a vendor neutral description format. Why not become a member and get started today?”

Want to become a member of the OpenAPI Initiative? Find more information here: https://www.openapis.org/membership/join 

OpenAPI Resources

To learn more about participating in the evolution of the OpenAPI Specification: https://www.openapis.org/participate/how-to-contribute

●   Become a Member

●   OpenAPI Specification Twitter

●   OpenAPI Specification GitHub – Get started immediately!

●   Share your OpenAPI Spec v3 Implementations

About Cisco Open Source

Cisco has a long history in the open source and standards ecosystems, with community-powered innovation in cloud native development, AI/ML, API security, connectivity, observability, network automation, and more. To find out more about Cisco’s open source activities: opensource.cisco.com 

About the OpenAPI Initiative

The OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) was created by a consortium of forward-looking industry experts who recognize the immense value of standardizing on how APIs are described. As an open governance structure under the Linux Foundation, the OAI is focused on creating, evolving and promoting a vendor neutral description format. The OpenAPI Specification was originally based on the Swagger Specification, donated by SmartBear Software. To get involved with the OpenAPI Initiative, please visit https://www.openapis.org

About Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more are considered critical to the development of the world’s most important infrastructure. Its development methodology leverages established best practices and addresses the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

ASC 2022 Community Partner Sponsorships Free to Members!

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Join us at The API Specifications Conference (ASC) this September 19-21 in South San Francisco! ASC 2022 is a place for API practitioners to come together and discuss the evolution of API technology. ASC includes cutting edge technology keynotes and sessions that chart the future of APIs, in-depth specification, and standards discussions. 

The event is designed to be highly interactive with plenty of discussion time throughout the workshops and sessions! 

Want to sponsor ASC 2022 but thought it was too much for your budget? Think again!

Community Partner Sponsorships are available for free for OpenAPI Members or $500 to non-members. (If you want to learn more about becoming a member of the OpenAPI Initiative, go here.) This partnership is a great opportunity to connect directly with API practitioners including API developers, API Operations teams, API Designers and Enterprise Architects. 

Deadline to sign up is Aug 19th. 

All Community Partner Sponsors will benefit from the following:

  • Display on shared table in sponsor showcase
  • Logo included in “Thank You to our Sponsors” keynote slide
  • Logo included in “Thank you to our Sponsors” blog post 
    • Will be posted prior to the event on OpenAPI blog
  • Recognition on event website (prominent logo display on event homepage)
  • Post-Conference Data Report: Provides event demographics and additional details on event performance

Become a Sponsor!

JOIN US AT ASC 2022! 

By Announcement, Blog, Events

The API Specification Conference – ASC 2022 – is being held in person from September 19 – 21 in South San Francisco! OpenAPI Initiative’s API Specifications Conference (ASC) is a place for API practitioners and enthusiasts to come together and discuss the evolution of API technologies. The OpenAPI Specification, RAML, Blueprint, gRPC, OData, JSON Schema, GraphQL, AsyncAPI, and other formats will all be topics, enabling attendees to get familiar with these formats and discuss how to use them in practice.

ASC includes cutting-edge technology keynotes and sessions that chart the future of APIs with in-depth specification and standards discussions. This year’s first announced keynote is presented by Jean Yang, CEO of Akita Software. Jean is the founder and CEO of Akita Software, a developer tools company building “one-click” observability. Previously, Jean was a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She has a Ph.D. from MIT, holds software tools patents from work at Microsoft Research and Facebook, and was selected as one of the MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 in 2016.

The event is designed to be highly interactive with plenty of discussion time throughout the workshops and sessions!

The lineup of early bird talks is also being announced and includes presentations from: 

  • Erez Yalon, Checkmarx, Evolution of the API Security Top 10
  • Jeremy Glassenberg, Docusign, Setting Standards and Create Smooth API Implementations
  • Brian Terlson, Microsoft, Developing API-First Multi-Protocol Services with Cadl 
  • Ben Hutton, Postman/JSON Schema, JSON Schema in Production
  • Shai Sachs, Wayfair, Specs are Important, Trust is Mandatory

You won’t want to miss it! Learn more and register to attend.

APIIDA, Delivering Automated API Management Solutions, Joins the OpenAPI Initiative

By Blog

The OpenAPI Initiative, the consortium of forward-looking industry experts focused on evolving and implementing the OpenAPI Specification (OAS), is welcoming APIIDA as a new member.

APIIDA provides an API management platform and develops solutions and products for customers to manage change by enabling technology-independent API management. The APIIDA solution separates APIs from their runtimes and adapts them to focused strategies, acting as independent entities. This is done with the goal to improve customer experience and allow the rapid growth of new business models and offerings. 

“We are excited to be a part of the OpenAPI Initiative. Having widely adopted standards like OpenAPI provides us with a stable base we can build upon. Together with the other members of the OpenAPI Initiative, we want to expand the reach and the adoption of the OpenAPI Specification. This will benefit APIIDA customers, and it’s the right thing to do for the broader API community,” said Markus Müller, CTO, and co-founder of APIIDA. “By actively contributing to the special interest groups and the steering committees we want to give back to the community.”

The company currently serves over 300 organizations of all sizes and across a wide range of industries. 

Want to become a member of the OpenAPI Initiative? Find more information here!

APIIDA Resources:

OpenAPI Resources

To learn more about participating in the evolution of the OpenAPI Specification: 

https://www.openapis.org/participate/how-to-contribute

About the OpenAPI Initiative

The OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) was created by a consortium of forward-looking industry experts who recognize the immense value of standardizing how APIs are described. As an open governance structure under the Linux Foundation, the OAI is focused on creating, evolving, and promoting a vendor-neutral description format. The OpenAPI Specification was originally based on the Swagger Specification, donated by SmartBear Software. To get involved with the OpenAPI Initiative, please visit https://www.openapis.org

About Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open-source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more are considered critical to the development of the world’s most important infrastructure. Its development methodology leverages established best practices and addresses the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

Karate Labs, Testing Automation Framework, is Joining the OpenAPI Initiative

By Blog

The OpenAPI Initiative, the consortium of forward-looking industry experts focused on evolving and implementing the OpenAPI Specification (OAS), is announcing that Karate Labs has joined as a new member.

5900 GitHub stars | Used by Fortune 500 companies worldwide 

Karate Labs is an open-source solution unifying API & UI test automation including mock-servers and performance testing. Karate’s core of API testing includes sophisticated payload data and schema validation, and a unique capability to re-use API tests as performance tests.

Karate Labs API data importer enables teams to import all leading sources of API data and to preview, edit and export the API sequence using an intuitive no-code user experience.

“With more teams adopting the OpenAPI Specification as a standard, we see the opportunity to align test automation efforts and further accelerate adoption. We are excited to join the OpenAPI Initiative to deliver even more value to our customers,” said Kapil Bakshi, co-founder, and CEO of Karate Labs. “With software products depending more than ever on APIs, the OpenAPI specification has injected more rigor and collaboration into how APIs are designed, implemented, and consumed. Karate Labs aims to simplify test automation for business stakeholders, product owners, and QA specialists.” 

OpenAPI Initiative is always welcoming NEW MEMBERS, find more information about becoming an OpenAPI member here!

Karate Labs Resources:

OpenAPI Resources

To learn more about participating in the evolution of the OpenAPI Specification: https://www.openapis.org/participate/how-to-contribute

About the OpenAPI Initiative

The OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) was created by a consortium of forward-looking industry experts who recognize the immense value of standardizing on how APIs are described. As an open governance structure under the Linux Foundation, the OAI is focused on creating, evolving, and promoting a vendor-neutral description format. The OpenAPI Specification was originally based on the Swagger Specification, donated by SmartBear Software. To get involved with the OpenAPI Initiative, please visit https://www.openapis.org

About Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open-source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more are considered critical to the development of the world’s most important infrastructure. Its development methodology leverages established best practices and addresses the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

OpenAPI v3.1 Resources for Tooling Developers 

By Blog

This post is authored by Phil Sturgeon, Green Tech consultant at Green Turtle, and Chairperson, Protect Earth. If you’d like to donate to Phil’s charity of choice, please see Protect Earth which is reforesting the U.K. one field at a time.

OpenAPI v3.1.0 has a bunch of great changes, solving problems like the subtle differences between JSON Schema objects and OpenAPI Schema objects, and adds support for Webhooks.

Upgrading tooling can be tricky, but this should be a lot easier than the jump from v2 to v3.0. To reduce the workload we’ve put together some convenient resources for tooling developers, to provide test cases, examples, and guidance in general.

First of all, these articles will show the differences between v3.0 and v3.1 from a user perspective:

Do you need to support everything?

Some of that content is aimed more at end users and what they will need to do, but what do tooling vendors need to do?

For new features like webhooks, you can think to yourself: does this tool need to support webhooks? If it’s a documentation tool, probably! If the tool is validating incoming web requests to your server, then probably not.

Some tools have gone with a definition of 3.1.0 support which is “a 3.1.0 document will work equally well as a 3.0.0 does in the same tool”, which is a good first step. Then support for other new keywords can be added later.

It’s my opinion that getting 3.1.0 documents to work at a basic level is more important than supporting every single feature in 3.1.0. End-users will create feature requests for the bits they’re most excited about as you go.

JSON Schema consolidation

For the bulk of the other changes, the difference is that instead of using a schema object that is very similar to JSON Schema, the OpenAPI Schema object is now literally JSON Schema. There’s some technicalities involved here and technically OpenAPI Schema has defined it’s own JSON Schema vocabulary, which extends the main JSON Schema vocabulary and adds support for discriminator. As the usage of discriminator in 3.1.0 was clarified to be purely a “hint” or shortcut for an existing oneOf, anyOf, allOf, this can be safely ignored by the vast majority of tooling.

tl;dr: you can use any valid JSON Schema tooling to work with the contents of a schema: object in OpenAPI, which means a lot of tools can phase out reliance on hand-crafted schema inspection code, and leverage any of the existing JSON Schema tooling instead.

For example, if a tool you maintain was manually validating OpenAPI Schemas in JavaScript before, it might be an idea to wrap that in an if ($version == "3.0") statement, use that old logic, deprecate it, then if the version is 3.1 you could leverage powerful tools like AJV or HyperJump to do all the heavy lifting. This immediately benefits your tooling from them doing all the work supporting modern JSON Schema / OAS3.1 keywords for you, like if/then/else.

It also means they can do the heavy lifting for other changes that come as JSON Schema matures into a stable release (although it would be brilliant if you could help them out a too).

Test Cases

To make sure your tooling works with OpenAPI v3.1, you’ll need some OpenAPI v3.1 documents to test against. There is no official list of OpenAPI v3.1 documents around, but there are some example files written by the community which can be used in a test suite to show pass or fail scenarios:

Validation Schema

Many tools use a JSON Schema document that describes valid OpenAPI documents. Yes that is a very meta sentence, but if you know what I mean then you are wondering if there is a new one for OpenAPI v3.1? Good news, there is!

Find Other v3.1 Tooling

To see how other OpenAPI tools are doing take a look at OpenAPI.Tools. Perhaps there is some other tooling you could leverage, or some developers you could team up with, or ask questions to, or hire to work on your thing too, etc.

Don’t forget to send a pull request to OpenAPI.Tools to say when you’re supporting v3.1, by adding v3_1: true to _data/tools.yml. You can also pop a openapi31 tag on GitHub so that other tooling aggregators can find you too!

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OpenAPI Welcomes New Member Optic

By Blog

The OpenAPI Initiative, the consortium of forward-looking industry experts focused on evolving and implementing the OpenAPI Specifications (OAS), is welcoming Optic as a new member!

Optic’s open source tools help make the OpenAPI Specification and API-first practices adoptable. Keeping up-to-date OpenAPI descriptions is an important part of any API-first workflow and Optic’s tools are intended to make it easy for every developer to work with OpenAPI without having to write it manually. 

“Optic has been one of the most popular open source tools for maintaining accurate API docs. We always had our own spec under the hood, but some of our largest customers and most influential community members started a project to adopt OpenAPI,” said Aidan Cunniffe, CEO and Founder, Optic. “Coming home to OpenAPI has been really great, and we’re excited to take all the learnings and use them to make OpenAPI more adoptable for teams.”

Once teams are planning and tracking their API changes in OpenAPI, they are well on their way to working API-first. Optic’s API Review tool (in beta) can plug into Pull Requests and CI and shows Code Reviewers the API changes under consideration and their impact. Teams can set up CI to test API changes against their company’s API guidelines. This helps developers think about the impact of problematic changes before they get deployed to consumers. 

Optic Resources

OpenAPI Resources

To learn more about participate in the evolution of the OpenAPI Specification: https://www.openapis.org/participate/how-to-contribute

About the OpenAPI Initiative

The OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) was created by a consortium of forward-looking industry experts who recognize the immense value of standardizing on how APIs are described. As an open governance structure under the Linux Foundation, the OAI is focused on creating, evolving, and promoting a vendor neutral description format. The OpenAPI Specification was originally based on the Swagger Specification, donated by SmartBear Software. To get involved with the OpenAPI Initiative, please visit https://www.openapis.org

About Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open-source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more are considered critical to the development of the world’s most important infrastructure. Its development methodology leverages established best practices and addresses the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

Announcing the API Specifications Conference (ASC) 2022 Early Bird Submission Deadline

By Blog

The fourth API Specifications Conference (ASC) will take place from September 19th through September 21st. We’re delighted to be back in-person this year after two years of having a virtual-only event! As part of the call for proposals we’re accepting and announcing five talks early. To have your talk considered, please have your submission completed by May 6th , 11:59 PM PDT.

The early bird submission will give you advance notice to prepare for your talk and your talk will be announced before the full schedule, giving you an opportunity to amplify your topic. Additionally, this year we are giving early birds the flexibility to choose which day they would like to speak.

Submit your talk today!

Early bird deadline: May 6th , 11:59 PM PDT

Regular deadline: May 27th , 11:59 PM PDTNew deadline – June 3rd, 11:59 PM PDT

We will notify any speakers who have an early bird submission accepted within two weeks after the deadline. Even if your early bird submission is not accepted in this round, it will still be reviewed along with other entries after the regular deadline.

If you need help or advice for your submissions, please contact speakers@openapis.org. If you are a first-time and/or underrepresented speaker, we especially want to help you submit a talk and are available to help you work through talk ideas or how to structure your proposal.

On behalf of the organizing committee,

Frank Kilcommins, Program Chair, ASC 2022