Welcome to the OpenAPI Initiative June 2024 Newsletter, our regular round-up of the latest stories from across the OpenAPI landscape.
Initiative News
We are excited to announce version 1.0.0 of the Arazzo Specification! Arazzo is the new official name for the Workflows Specification, which was decided on by the community after many rounds of debate. Arazzo is a specification that allows API providers to describe sequences of API calls, both within one API or across various APIs, with the means to link them together so implementers can orchestrate a series of steps based on known success and failure criteria. Arazzo is a significant step forward in describing the increasingly complex API landscape. You can learn more about Arazzo in our announcement.
The announcement of the Arazzo Specification means that the OpenAPI Initiative is moving to a multi-specification organization, with the OpenAPI Specification and the Arazzo Specification both falling under the OpenAPI Initiative umbrella. This will change how we maintain specifications consistently, especially as we add more specifications in the future. We will discuss this in a future post that describes our evolving landscape and governance approach in more detail.
In case you’re wondering: Arazzo means “Tapestry” in Italian, and was chosen because the specification is both about intricately weaving together something out of smaller things, and about telling a story that ends up being bigger than the sum of its parts.
Specification News
With planned patch releases for the 3.0 and 3.1 branches coming up, it’s “clarification season” in the OpenAPI Specification project. These changes address common questions and confusion, to make sure that the specification is as clear as possible. We’ve also made improvements to the tooling for publishing the specifications as HTML from the Markdown sources that we maintain in the repository, in preparation for releasing new versions. You can see all the changes and activity on the OpenAPI-Specification repository on GitHub.
Our biggest contributor for clarifications to the OpenAPI Specification and fixing an enormous number of ambiguities and open questions in the specification is Henry Andrews. A big thank you to Henry for all his effort in making our “small print” readable by anyone.
Our weekly Technical Developer Community meetings (0900 Pacific time on Thursdays, everyone welcome) are well-attended, full of thoughtful debate and discussion, and the engagement there – as well as all the hard work in between the meetings – continues to move us forward with purpose.
Community News
In this newsletter, we announce our Community Heroes feature, which provides a profile of an invaluable member of the OpenAPI community. In this first feature, we interviewed Henry Andrews, a subject matter expert in OpenAPI and JSON Schema and a prolific contributor to the community. You can read more on our blog.
We can also bring you news of the imminent release of our first OpenAPI Initiative training course, OpenAPI Fundamentals. This course provides foundational knowledge of OpenAPI, with the history of the language and practical examples of creating and using an OpenAPI description. This free course is available on The Linux Foundation Training and Certification platform from June 11th 2024.
Events Round-up
The summer is fast approaching in the Northern Hemisphere and consequently, the conference schedule tends to take a hiatus. We have, however, been busy running our OAI track at various conferences since our last newsletter. The OAI track aims to bring together community leaders and practitioners to provide a focused and detailed series of talks on subjects across the spectrum of OpenAPI Initiative specifications. The tracks are orchestrated by Erik Wilde, who describes them as:
“The OAI Track brings the API community together around OpenAPI and standardization in general. We typically have presentations about core specification topics, we talk about practices and tooling, and we also have contributions where presenters share how OpenAPI and standardization helped them on their API journey. Join us at any OAI Track to get the latest news and high-quality presentations about OpenAPI and other OAI activities!”
The OAI track was hosted at three apidays conferences in April and May, in Singapore, New York, and Helsinki, as well as at the JAX Conference in Mainz, Germany, in April. We heard from great speakers, including Frank Kilcommins who covered the finer points of Arazzo (including unveiling the name at apidays Helsinki). Darrel Miller looked at consuming APIs for “SDK Haters” in New York, while Sohaib Tariq discussed lessons learned from one million API definitions in Singapore.
We will be running the OAI track at conferences in the future, including the apidays Paris conference, where we plan to provide extensive training sessions on OpenAPI. We will launch an official “OAI certification program” in the second half of the year, at both the on-site training sessions at the apidays Paris conference and online courses. Stay tuned for details and please check out the OAI event calendar for a full list of upcoming events.
We also want to hear from you! Please get in touch on the Outreach channel on Slack with news of upcoming events, meet-ups, or anything you want to share with the OpenAPI community. We’d also love to hear about your experiences of using OpenAPI in designing and implementing your APIs, and share those experiences with the community on our blog.
Finally…
That’s it for this newsletter. If you have news you want to share with the OpenAPI community please get in touch by email or join the Outreach channel on Slack. We also welcome suggestions on how we can improve this newsletter or bring you information that can help make the most of how you use specifications published by the OpenAPI Initiative.