Does postman do anything curl doesn’t? When I was on onboarding at a job my pair started teaching me postman, which ended with me teaching them curl and them dropping postman. If you need to share queries, put them in version control!
It’s like saying web browser doesn’t do anything that curl doesn’t. It’s technically true but not really.
But it’s also technically incorrect. Even on request level, not speaking about all the things on top that Postman does, Postman also does grpc and graphql (edit: and websocket), which curl doesn’t.
Once you start adding all the features, it’s very hard to replace Postman with anything.
Postman can even export a GraphQL request to a curl command.
Pretty much applies to a lot of startups. VC money does weird things.
I prefer this VS Code plugin for the very simple stuff https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re...
I'm sure there's a gap for a "better postman" that's more complex that that, but a lot less encrusted than postman.
However IMHO, the more complex scripted testing is better done in your main dev language
Source: I have been working with Postman a lot this week. It's bad.
Like Postman, without all the bullshit. Which is to say, like a few-versions-ago Postman.
The advantage of Bruno (and the VS code plugin) that storing data in "just a file" is friendly to keeping a local copy, and also to sharing, reviewing and versioning with existing tools (git).
How does insomnia handle that?
In general I like Postman because of the ergonomics, not because it does something that more primordial tools can't. Makes debugging easier.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
"Dropbox’s stock falls as it struggles to squeeze more revenue from existing customers" - https://siliconangle.com/2023/02/16/dropboxs-stock-falls-str...
Setting valuation aside, clearly there is some non-negative value prop for some set of users who don't want to build everything themselves (as evidenced by the fact that they have a non-trivial number of paying users).
"I am become pedant, destroyer of discourse."
Here's the comment if you're curious.
> As a [type of tech person], [product] is completely unnecessary as you can easily build a similar system yourself by simply combining [tool A] with [tool B] and [tool C]. It's so simple!
I'm not disagreeing with your point, but it misses the point that often the benefit of using a particular product is that you don't have to build it yourself, not to mention the other benefits you could get from using the exact same system as somebody else (e.g. sharing Postman collections).
Yes! It's supports functional BDD-style tests, "mock servers" (really "fake" servers), a walled garden for saving and sharing data (to frustrate engineering managers and ops folks), perf tests (soon? now?), contract testing, and more. Did I mention that it's a GUI tool, so it must be "easier?"
They're trying to become a one-stop-shop for dumbing down web dev. Ideally, inside the walled garden. That has a certain appeal to management.
We have lots of unit, integration, and live canary testing, the postman usage was only during oncall/operations, so we weren’t using any of those neat features.
Also I can stitch together different APIs by taking response from one API and pass it as request to other APIs. For instance I invoke login API, grab session ID from the response and pass it to other APIs which are behind login.
Of course one could do all of this in curl but it’ll be cumbersome. And yes, if all you want to do is invoke a single API then Postman is definitely an overkill.
Yes, a cursory examination of postman would tell you that.
It might, but I think the appeal of Postman is how straightforward it is to play with APIs across basically anything in the HTTP stack, with a nice GUI. Also, I thought Postman also had the ability to export your queries to curl if you want to need to use it outside Postman.