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Comment by the_arun | Hacker News Reader

Apples vs Oranges? To me, async seems like an implementation detail. Why are we comparing it with Open API which is a spec? Sorry my mind is confused.

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AsyncAPI is about specifying push-based APIs (which are still far less standardized imho), and not about if a HTTP endpoint processes requests asynchronously (if that's what you meant). For example, if you let clients connect to your system via WebSocket - how do you specify the format of the push messages sent over the WebSocket channel?

https://www.asyncapi.com/docs/getting-started/coming-from-op...

https://www.asyncapi.com/docs/specifications/v2.1.0

I _think_ the reason that the comparison with OpenAPI feels weird is because OpenAPI uses one (and only one) communication interface in REST. AsyncAPI is trying to accomplish the same thing without a consensus in communication interface. This requires that any specs are far more abstract to encompass the possible options.

But consider what OpenAPI/Swagger actually changed - it made for a singular page to tell a user (or machine) all the possible ways to interact with the service and what the shape of the requests and responses would look like. AsyncAPI is meant to do the same, but it's much harder to grok with all the various protocols generalized into unnatural-looking fields/URIs/etc.

what "async" means for you? is it just JS async/await for you? have you used Kafka, or Websocket or only writing and interacting with REST APIs?

For me Async means - non-blocking experience to the user.

In context of APIS, "async" communications means event notifications and message queues: Amazon SNS/SQS, Amazon Kinesis, Azure Event hub, Kafka, RabbitMQ etc. Anything where you send a message and don't wait for a response, unlike http.

Minor correction to what I said. Async means we do not keep someone/something waiting for response. There are so many options on the implementation as you described.

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