Hacker News Reader

Comment by snikch | Hacker News Reader

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.

Edit 1: Grammar / Spelling

View on HN

you didn't answer the question.

> 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.

I can't use postman easily. I don't have a Google account. What do I do?

You don't need one? Install the add on directly.

Everyone can use it easily. It's an easy tool to use. You don't need a Google account to install an extension.

> What do I do?

Install the extension and use postman easily.

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)

Hmmm, I don't know. When I install it on Windows Chrome, I immediately get an icon next to the URL bar. Sorry I can't be of more help.

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.

Like Tesla said "if you thought a bit more, you wouldn't have to sweat so much"

All of those would be eliminated with preparation and planning. And the results would be better quality than ad hoc poking with Bash

Yeah, if we all prepared and planned perfectly for absolutely everything we do in life then we probably would need less assistance.

Meanwhile, in the real world, sometimes things have to be done fast and messily.

Testing http:// services is not one of those things

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 have a "collection" of curl command lines aliased in my ~/.bash_aliases file. Maybe something like that would help you?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com