We’re excited to see today’s release of version 3 of the AsyncAPI standard.
We’ve talked about AsyncAPI here before, and it has been an important part of IBM’s Event Endpoint Management for years. AsyncAPI is an open standard for documenting and describing your asynchronous APIs, such as your queues and topics in message brokers and queue managers. Having a standard way to document these critical aspects of your architectures brings benefits in discoverability, as well as enabling a growing ecosystem of tools and utilities.
Today, AsyncAPI has taken a big step forward with version 3.0.0.
Request / Reply
The big new feature enabled in v3 is the ability to document request/reply patterns. AsyncAPI has long been great at describing publish/subscribe interactions, but applications using queues for request/reply interactions now have a way to describe things like the response destination and correlation IDs.
For more info, you can see this blog post on the feature.
Reuse and references
Overall, the structure of an AsyncAPI has been refined to make it much easier to reuse and refer to components of your API definition, even where those components are contained in separate files. This is particularly useful where you want to document and describe multiple applications or entire Event Driven Architectures, as it means you no longer need to copy/paste big chunks of information across multiple separate documents and then keep them in sync.
Other improvements
Finally, there are a host of other improvements and refinements, such as making AsyncAPI more consistent and easier to use, and increasing the places that we have to provide that essential description and context for our APIs.
For a list of some of these, you can see the version 3 release notes.
Find out more
If you would like to know more, there is a community webinar on December 19th that will be exploring some of the details.
Congratulations to the community on this significant milestone, and we’re excited to see what this evolution of the standard will enable!