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Comment by ta8645 | Hacker News Reader

After taking a quick look, I still don't know what this is, what Postman is, or who would use either, or for what. No doubt I could spend a bit more time to sort it out, but it would be nice to not have to.

Perhaps leaving someone like me to wallow in his ignorance is just fine. But being very clear and concise about what is being offered, without relying on knowledge of another product, might attract more of the uninitiated to your offering.

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To be fair this is a fairly niche product, and anyone who is in the market for it will know postman.

Ultimately this is a rest client used for troubleshooting, debugging and developing RESTful applications (ie: it's use to connect to websites and APIs.

It honestly looks pretty useful and better than postman so I'll try it out since I work with things that require software like this

> what Postman is

You're just not the target. No harm in that.

> But being very clear and concise about what is being offered

It already is, the huge screenshot and the verbiage used ("the open source Postman alternative with type safety") makes it pretty clear what it's about for people who might be interested.

I don't believe everything needs to be understandable by everyone. You don't need to "sell" specialized tooling to people who don't know what it's for.

I would argue the offering is actually very clear. A nice demo is included. If you’re not using any REST clients it might be a bit harder to understand but I doubt you’re the intended target group

> I would argue the offering is actually very clear.

What is it?

My take: RecipeUI a Postman-like tool that offers convenient type safety and autocomplete on top of what Postman already does.

What is Postman? It's a tool that allows you to configure, save, and replay HTTP requests. It helps developers building backend server APIs, so they don't have to keep fiddling around with their frontend. In many greenfield projects, the frontend doesn't even exist yet and Postman is effectively the only way to easily test what you're working on.

The alternative to postman is writing custom Python/NodeJS/etc programs to send these requests or painfully doing it with curl and bash.

I think it's cool and I'll probably try it the next time I have to work on REST APIs.

Honestly I'm still not entirely sold on the idea of Postman, for sending a simple HTTP request I find the python requests library a lot more intuitive to work with.

Then again I'm mostly looking at APIs to eventually use them in some other python script so perhaps my use case is not the best fit.

Unless the API does something weird you can do a lot worse than using curl and bash. I mean even using telnet (or openssl s_client) is not too bad if you're only doing a simple GET.

It definitely is. I am using curl and postman, but I never work(ed) in/with python apart from one course at university

Postman is great for sharing API collections with others, especially if they aren’t a developer. Adding type safety to it is a great way to provide hints for acceptable values.

> on top of what Postman already does

The question was what that is.

"What does Foo do?" -- "Well just like what Bar does?" -- <no clue about Bar either>

Literally, the next 3 words from the quote answers your question.

> What is Postman? It's a tool that allows you to configure, save, and replay HTTP requests.

I've used it a lot whenever I've needed to integrate with a third party through a REST api. Postman for me is the playground where I build the queries and play with iteratively as I develop the integration.

Also, the webdev should try the page someday with a browser that has an aspect ratio of less than 2:1.

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