2023 year in review

The end of the year is nearly upon us and we have lots to celebrate! Specmatic just turned 4 and the release of version 1.0 of Specmatic this month, was an exciting milestone to achieve. We have rolled out many compelling new capabilities this year and there is much more to come!

In this issue:

• Conference appearances
• Specmatic Insights
• VSCode extension
• Word is getting outsharing
• Specmatic explainer videos
• Specmatic Contributors
• Latest release
• Features released in 2023
• Upcoming features

Conference appearances

The team has presented at several conferences this year including Agile India 2023, YOW in Australia and AsyncAPI on Tour in Bangalore plus many smaller Meetups. They’ve been spreading the word about the benefits of CDD and how Specmatic can help make it all happen.

Look inside your microservices implementation with Specmatic Insights

Specmatic Insights is a new tool that aggregates Specmatic reports from various environments such as your CI/CD pipelines, and visualizes how your organization’s microservices talk to each other, providing actionable insights.

Contract testing made even easier with VSCode extension

The new Specmatic VSCode extension makes it easy to set up and run your contract tests from within VSCode. An interactive UI takes care of your configurations for running contract tests and remembers your settings for future tests. It can also automatically generate examples and test data for your OpenAPI specifications using GPT-4.

Word is getting out!

This year, others have been picking up on the benefits of Contract Driven Development and how Specmatic facilitates a CDD workflow.

In March, InfoQ published an article outlining an organization’s Contract-Driven Development adoption journey. It covers off the many benefits of CDD as well as how the organization overcame some of the challenges.

Dave Farley posted a video on “Easy Microservice Testing” with Specmatic to his Continuous Delivery YouTube channel which sparked some lively conversation.

Serghei Lakovlev has created a handy action to set up a Specmatic environment for use in Github actions.

Markus Oberlehner discovered the benefits of stubbing endpoints with Spermatic and shared his thoughts on YouTube.

Geovanny Ribeiro shared on LinkedIn when he discovered he could stub http APIs with their OpenAPI specifications and mock a Kafka broker with AsyncAPI specification.

Specmatic explainer videos

This year we’ve produced a series of videos to help people understand the benefits of Contract-Driven Development and how Specmatic works. You’ll find them on the Specmatic website and on our YouTube channel.

Specmatic Contributors

We are thrilled to have a group of talented contributors to the Specmatic project. With 40 forks and 163 stars, we have an active community! Thanks to everyone who has contributed code this past year, we appreciate your efforts:

Andre Roaldseth, Christophe Lopez, Hari Krishnan, Jaydeep Kulkarni, Joel Rosario, Lingxu Meng, Markus Oberlehner, Naresh Jain, Naresh Kumar, Rahul Shekhawat, Rosdi Kasim, Samuel Antoine, Swamideshmukh, Vikram Rao, Westse, Yntelectual, and Zapheus-Runplaywin.

Latest Specmatic release: 1.1.0

Recent releases include the following updates:

• #721 Implemented support for the RFC3339 datetime format. by @jaydeepk in #846
• Repo report order stability by @westse in #851
• Fixed proxy error when converging array types by @joelrosario in #855
• Support for all syntactical equivalents of free form objects by @jaydeepk in #853
• Support json and yml extensions by @harikrishnan83 in #854
• Added support for minProperties and maxProperties
• Added support for oneOf nested within allOf
• Use schema example as the default example

You can download the latest version here.

Features released in 2023

We’ve been busy with 40 updates made to the project this year! A lot of new capabilities have been added to Specmatic in response to user requirements including:

• API coverage reports
• Redis stub – private beta
• Hooks for emulating payment gateways
• Node wrapper v2
• JDBC stub – private beta
• Python wrapper
• AsyncAPI Kafka support – private beta

Coming up next…

Here is a peak at some of the features we are planning to develop next in Specmatic:

• AsyncAPI General Availability
• AsyncAPI v3 support (beta)
• OpenAPI links support
• OpenAPI 3.1 support

As always, we’d love to hear how you are using Specmatic and how Contract-Driven Development has transformed your microservices development and deployment experience. What have been your challenges and what have been your wins? Got questions? Contact us and ask away.