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InfoQ Homepage News AsyncAPI and Postman Partner to Bring New Tooling to Asynchronous APIs

AsyncAPI and Postman Partner to Bring New Tooling to Asynchronous APIs

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This month, AsyncAPI and Postman announced a partnership to support the AsyncAPI specification on the Postman platform.

In their respective announcements, Fran Méndez, founder and project director of AsyncAPI's, and Abhinav Asthana, CEO of Postman, detail how this partnership allows to boost the development of Asynchronous APIs. This partnership will build better tools to help engineers create and maintain Asynchronous APIs while using their favorite programming languages and frameworks.

Méndez told InfoQ what AsyncAPI users could expect from this partnership:

I think there are two clear things to expect here:

  1. The AsyncAPI initiative is now sustainable and can grow faster, and so users will benefit from it directly. We'll be able to work quickly and on more things at the same time.
  2. Postman will become a multi-protocol tool with support for AsyncAPI. That means, no need to use a different tool per protocol. Postman will be able to offer a unified solution for all your APIs.

Postman is a collaboration platform for API development that provides tools for building and streamlining API development. It is well-known for its desktop client that allows developers to interact with their HTTP APIs.

AsyncAPI is an open specification meant to be an industry standard for defining asynchronous APIs. As Asthana states, "AsyncAPI is a 'sister' specification to OpenAPI; it uses the same base syntax to describe information for an API and adopt JSON schema for modeling the objects published and subscribed." The initiative aims to cultivate open-source tools to build and maintain event-driven architecture easily.

InfoQ took the opportunity to talk with Méndez about the AsyncAPI initiative.

InfoQ: When did the AsyncAPI initiative begin? Who is currently working on it?

Fran Méndez: The AsyncAPI Initiative began back in 2017, ~one year after I started working on the specification. We're currently four people working on it: Łukasz Gornicki, Jonas Lagoni, Maciej Urbańzcyk, and I. However, we're hiring and want to grow the team in the next months.

InfoQ: Is AsyncAPI currently used in production? Where?

Méndez: It's difficult for us to see who's using AsyncAPI since they don't have to tell us anything or register anywhere. However, we know Slack, Adidas, Salesforce, SAP, and PayPal —among many others— are using the specification and the tooling in their daily work.

InfoQ: How can software developers and architects get started with AsyncAPI?

Méndez: I think the best way is to start reading our Getting Started guide and Tutorials from our website. Also, we recommend people to join our Slack workspace, where we'll be happy to help.

InfoQ: How can InfoQ readers contribute to the AsyncAPI effort?

Méndez: Join our Slack workspace and talk to Łukasz Gornicki. He's the best guy to help you on that matter. Also, opening issues in our Github repos is welcome too.

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