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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

Have you heard of Bruno, a similar open source project also with no cloud accounts? https://github.com/usebruno/bruno

How is yours different? Was there something in Bruno you didn't like?

Thanks for the good question. I have tried Bruno. Comparing with mine, it does not support GraphQL subscriptions, WebSocket and gRPC at the moment, which are needed in my daily work. It also does not log the connection detail, which is very useful in infrastructure troubleshooting. It does not persist responses as well, which I would sometimes need that. My application addresses these demands.

Bruno is Postman-like. It only saves when user clicks "Save" explicitly, which I would always forget and causing data loss. Personally I like Insomnia's style more. It saves modification immediately, which is adopted in my application.

My application also features multiple request templates per API, which I could not find an equivalent in existing HTTP client softwares.

Bruno did have something shining which mine does not address yet -- it allows collaboration over git.

Please correct if I am wrong.

Great response, thank you! I think some of those features are pretty valuable (like the other protocols, and the connection logging).

Bruno does allow git collaboration, but all that really means is that its internal markup language (bru, https://www.usebruno.com/bru) is human-readable (and thus diff-able). If your internal save files are similar, they could also be synced in git.

Unfortunately, my application is designed to persist binary requests and responses, so the file format is also binary. Encoding it to a text format is not ideal as it would increase the file size drastically. This is a big barrier and I do not have a concrete direction yet to make collaboration possible in a transparent and easy way.

Can't you store the connection metadata (like a curl request) in plaintext, but binary blobs in git lfs or similar?

Thanks for the suggestion. It seems only plaintext information is interested in most use cases, so this might work. I will consider this solution.

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