The Linux Foundation announced Thursday its Open API Initiative to recognize the value of standardizing on how REST 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.
SmartBear Software is donating the Swagger Specification directly to the OAI as the basis of this Open Specification. APIs form the connecting glue between modern applications. Nearly every application uses APIs to connect with corporate data sources, third party data services or other applications.
Creating an open description format for API services that is vendor neutral, portable and open is critical to accelerating the vision of a truly connected world.
The founding members of the Open API Initiative include 3Scale, Apigee, Capital One, Google, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, PayPal, Restlet and SmartBear.
The Initiative will extend the Swagger specification and format to create an open technical community within which members can easily contribute to building a vendor neutral, portable and open specification for providing metadata for RESTful APIs. This open specification will allow both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of the respective services with a minimal amount of implementation logic.
The Initiative will also promote and facilitate the adoption and use of an open API standard. The open governance model for the Open API Initiative includes a Technical Developer Committee (TDC) that will maintain and evolve the specification, as well as engage users for feedback to inform development.
Swagger was created in 2010 and offered under an open source license a year later. It is a description format used by developers in industries ranging from consumer electronics to energy, finance, healthcare, government, media and travel to design and deliver APIs that support a range of connected applications and services.
With downloads of Swagger and Swagger tooling nearly tripling over the last year, it is considered the most popular open source framework for defining and creating RESTful APIs. SmartBear recently acquired the Swagger API open source project from Reverb Technologies, and is working with its industry peers to ensure the specification and format can be advanced for years to come.
The goal of the OAI specification is to define a standard, language-agnostic interface to REST APIs which allows both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of the service without access to source code, documentation or through network traffic inspection.
When properly defined, a consumer can understand and interact with the remote service with a minimal amount of implementation logic. Similar to what interfaces have done for lower-level programming, Swagger removes the guesswork in calling the service.
In organizing the OAI, SmartBear is donating the Swagger Specification to the foundation. Independently, SmartBear continues to invest heavily to foster the Swagger community, ecosystem and tooling built on top of the Swagger Specification. With over 350,000 downloads per month of Swagger and Swagger tooling, the Swagger Specification is the world’s most popular description format for defining Restful APIs.
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