I find your response to be really arrogant. Postman is an easily installed Chrome extension that can be supplied to everyone on your team, regardless of skill level. Requiring a cli isn't as easy as a one click install - there's dependencies (Python etc.) that are required which, while easy for many, aren't as simple for a lot of web developers - especially those who focus on front end development and may just need an easy tool for inspecting API requests they need to make.
There's still a wide market for GUI based programs, and Postman is an excellent extension that I've used for years (even though I'm a CLI guy myself). It's always there, easy to use, and powerful to boot.
> There are lots of things that you can do easily with postman but would be difficult with a CLI tool.
the jury is still out on this one. i'm not buying it now either. you've convinced me Postman is easier for non-technical people, but i'm not convinced it's more useful or easier than a command line.
Uhh how about a little more detail? I installed it, but I have no idea how to open it in a tab. Unlike my other extensions, I don't see any icon buttons next to my URL bar.
EDIT: If like me, you're using a Mac, you can use Alfred to open Postman. I still have no idea where to find the extension (I have both the extension and the "packaged app", whatever the difference is, installed on my machine)
Totally agreed. Another benefit (or set of benefits): when you've got 5 CLI tabs open already, and you're trying to remember where your curl response went, it's nice to know Postman has (a) history of recent requests in a readily clickable list, (b) a different window that's easily accessible, and (c) any saved headers and tokens that I can otherwise never remember.
I know that there is nothing that an add-in can do that a scripting environment can't and it is not a that difficult, which is the assertion I am responding to. Sooner or later the dialog box driven tool will prevent you from doing what you want.
I would still like an example of a series of Http:// requests that is "difficult" to do with just curl, wget and a bit of shell script.
Curl is my go to tool for this sort of interaction. I have been a long time Postman user though. The number one feature it has which curl doesn't is collections. Which is basically their name for saving queries. I have my companies entire API saved in various collections which allows me to quickly do any API call without looking at documentation or having to whip up so JSON boilerplate.
For more advanced or one off testing, curl would still be my go to.
I agree that CLI are awesome and you can do way more using it that with any other UI (specially a web one), but taking HTTP API testing as an example, postman lets you do a bunch of stuff that are so simple with one click that I can see some people not wanting to dive in the CLI world, write a bunch of stuff and also having to store environment data for requests with extra files (I think thats where the 'difficult' from the previous comment comes along, but that's just me guessing...)
Taking that into consideration, Postman's web interface lets you
- See all the request history that you can easily reply any of them with one click
- Save requests and share them (including a collection of requests)
- Have and share environment variables to change, for example, between production and development API urls, password, params, etc (I know, a CLI also lets you do that, but it soooo simple to just select and preview the environment variables from the list)
- easily handle oAuth and other authentication forms out of the box
But you will suffer (a lot) trying to use Postman to
- Handle binary input/outputs
- Stream responses
- Handle cookies
So, depending on what your day to day problems are you should use a different tool... Oh, and I didn't know about HTTPie, thanks for sharing :)
None of those things are intractable, I have had scripts handle them all.
On top of that, writing scripts educates you on how such systems work. It really isn't challenging.
Sure. I can script a lot of things and have learned a ton by doing that. But when I'm focused on making an API or debugging one, I don't want to spend the time writing a script if there is a readily available tool that does what I need. I can better spend the time improving the app.
