We’re proud to be supporting the launch of the new Linux Foundation collaborative effort for Web APIs: the Open API Initiative (see the announcement here). The initiative will take forward the great foundational work done under the Swagger banner by Tony Tam and others to create a new, more formal description format for Web APIs, provisionally called OADF – Open API Description Format.

At 3scale, we strongly believe that description formats such as this – specifically shared open description formats – are a fundamental cornerstone of API development and adoption. They enable tooling innovation, adoption, clarity of API specifications, and help guide design.

It’s a great sign that key industry players such as ourselves, Apigee, Capital One, Google, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, PayPal, Restlet, and SmartBear are coming together in an initiative like this.

3scale was an early adopter of the Swagger format, and we’ve enabled customers to use the format for over two years. The formation of the OAI and collaboration around taking the format forward is a great sign of the format gaining maturity. Having a neutral forum to advance the specification format is an important development to ensure a neutral playing field for tools and solutions.

We’re also involved in initiatives such as APIs.json, which we see as highly complimentary to OADF and the OAI’s mission.

We’re very much looking forward to collaborating on the evolution of the format and working with the OAI partners. Congratulations to those organizations and to Tony Tam and SmartBear for pushing through to create the new organization!