RAML 1.0 Current Status

Category : News , Updates

First of all, as it’s been a while, but we should not forget it is a new year, so The RAML Workgroup wishes everyone a Happy New Year 2016.

Before we start with the current status of RAML 1.0, let me quickly say; wow, last year (2015) was fantastic for everyone who shares our passion around APIs and especially RAML. With Swagger evolving into the Open API Initiative, Apiary announcing their plans for API Blueprint, and the RAML Workgroup releasing their first release candidate for RAML 1.0 it was a year of significant announcements. We should all have realized by now; designing APIs is critical and should be the forefront of every API strategy. It will not only significantly help to improve the experience developers will have using APIs, but also the overall experience someone has using your APIs.

RAML is as one of the standards to document and design APIs recognized by many companies and press already. RAML 0.8 introduced elements that help not only to document and design your APIs but also to create re-usable fragments to support DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) pattern and consequently build a layer of standardization across multiple smaller branches inside companies. A lot of time passed since then, where we had the chance to learn from you about how you use RAML and what you are missing, and built a list of candidates for RAML 1.0 (RC) that we announced towards the end of 2015. That was a huge step forward for us, but it wasn’t the only highlight last year. Let’s quickly recap some highlights in 2015:

I want to thank everyone who worked tirelessly for getting us to where we are today. To everyone who provided feedback for the initial list of candidates. Everyone should get a virtual round of applause.

We have big plans for RAML in 2016, but right now it is vital for us to finalize RAML 1.0. We never expected the tremendous amount of feedback we have got on different channels such as emails, forum, Github, Twitter, and many more. Everyone loves the current candidates in RAML 1.0 (RC) and already played a bit around with the new features using the API Workbench. Collecting and evaluating the feedback for the new features, removing any ambiguity, and making every aspect of the specification consistent is one of our highest priorities right now. It is crucial for us to do the right decisions even if that means to step back a bit and take more time to make sure that we do not end up with any inconsistency or ambiguity inside the RAML specification. We believe that this is currently the best for RAML. That said, even if you do not hear anything from us, we are still there. We are just deeply thinking about your feedback. Some of you even got calls from us to make sure we understand your concerns. Sorry for that!

You might ask yourself, so what is the status? We are almost there! We only have a couple of pieces left that we discuss to move on to Release Candidate 2. We decided to do a second as we had some significant changes that we want to validate with you first before going to release the final version. You can track the different stages for the final release on our Github repository raml-org/raml-spec, and specifically raml10-rc1 (released), raml10-rc2 (almost done), raml10-rcx (some items that are still not finalised, but will take a bit more time), and last but not least you can track everything that we had to postpone for another version using raml1x.

Let’s get together again and get RAML 1.0 out!

If you have any question or comments, write us an email to info@raml.org. Looking forward hearing from you!

The RAML Workgroup