AsyncAPI + Postman: Working Toward Making Asynchronous APIs as Successful as REST APIs

A week ago, Fran Mendez of AsyncAPI announced their new partnership with Postman, a move that will take asynchronous APIs to the next level and grow the team working on the open source initiative full-time. The partnership with Postman will accelerate the evolution of the AsyncAPI specification with the addition of tooling and support for more programming languages and frameworks, both of which will make it easier for developers to create event-driven software. They also announced that they are going to find a neutral, open-source software foundation where the AsyncAPI project will live, demonstrating their commitment to keeping the project’s direction independent from any single organization, remaining open-source, and embracing the values of community, collaboration, and transparency that go with it.

Over the years Postman has improved their technology offerings to make it as easy as possible for developers to create enterprise-grade RESTful APIs. They have done this through their own tooling and generous support of open-source projects such as OpenAPI, which is the industry standard for defining synchronous, RESTful APIs. Postman’s partnership with AsyncAPI is great for the developer community as it allows the AsyncAPI Initiative to draw on the Postman team’s experience with OpenAPI and move towards a consistent developer experience and tooling for the creation of both synchronous and asynchronous APIs.

At Solace, we help organizations design, develop, and operate event-driven systems, and we’ve seen the challenges that organizations face while doing so. Developers need a consistent way to design, document, develop, manage, and test both synchronous and asynchronous APIs, while also supporting multiple protocols and data formats. This is why we continue to support AsyncAPI’s goal of “making asynchronous APIs and event-driven architecture as successful and mature as synchronous REST APIs”. We have been active participants in the initiative, support it in our PubSub+ Event Portal product, and are a platinum sponsor along with other industry leaders like Mulesoft, SAP, and Salesforce.

Our industry-leading event portal (PubSub+ Event Portal) allows architects and developers to design and manage their event-driven system while being able to export AsyncAPI documents for designed applications. This allows users to design using a friendly web interface and still leverage AsyncAPI’s tools to create a consistent development process (i.e. generate a code skeleton that is pre-configured with the proper channels, messages and schemas defined in the design, etc.). We also anticipate future enhancements around the use of AsyncAPI in PubSub+ as the initiative moves forward.

We are excited to continue working with AsyncAPI and the supporting community in building the future of event-driven architecture and celebrate the announcement of this important partnership with Postman.

If you’re interested in seeing PubSub+ Event Portal and AsyncAPI in action you can learn more here:

• Hands-on Tutorial: Design to Code using Event Portal + AsyncAPI Code Generation
  

  These are the steps that the codelab will walk you through:

  1. What You'll Learn
  2. Use Case Overview
  3. What You'll Need
  4. Design Your EDA
  5. Install the AsyncAPI Generator
  6. Develop the RideDropoffProcessor
  7. Extend Your EDA Design
  8. Develop the RideDropoffConsumer
  9. Takeaways

  Follow our step-by-step Codelab tutorial accompanied with this blog

  Open this codelab

  
• Live Coding Session with Solace Dev Advocates and Fran Mendez, Founder of AsyncAPI: 
  
• Blog Post: AsyncAPI Code Generation: Microservices Using Spring Cloud Stream