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Comment by vietvu | Hacker News Reader

Another day, another HTTP client. Why do we need so many of them? I and my team are thinking about just ditch all of these, and use python + requests/httpx as the client. If need a quick call, just curl/wget.

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You probably don't need all of them. But we've created HTTPie Desktop based on the feedback of HTTPie CLI users over the past decade who wanted to have the same comfort on the desktop as they do in the terminal. The feedback we've been receiving from devs actually using has been incredible.

100s of endpoints with various evolving payloads across 100s of developers.

The problem space is shared documentation, not 'make http request'

I think OpenAPI is a better choice for this kinda stuff. The API docs are the source code and less lock-in that way. Devs can still use the tools they want.

OpenAPI only describes the endpoints. Ultimately people want examples and to test their endpoints collaboratively rather than just see a description of it with the fields it accepts. Actual use cases and a proper flow of being able to authenticate and use that token to call the other APIs and check the responses is what people seem to want more than a "dumb" curl GUI

OpenAPI has example capabilities built in and there are many interfaces for turning the specs into WebUI

https://swagger.io/docs/specification/adding-examples/

I've been using elixir LiveBook as my http client. It works flawlessly

You could do something very similar with jupyter

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