I think it's fair to criticize them given a fair number of alternatives in this thread (with their own shortcomings). It's kind of silly to post something to hackernews and not expect criticism.
And if JMeter just isn't quite doing it for you, turn the dial back another few years and experience the joy of the MDI GUI provided by SoapUI. You too can experience the thrills of getting to tweak JVM memory options so it doesn't crash when you try to load a particularly large and unwieldly industry-specific WSDL for an interface standard that undergirds major national infrastructure.
Oh and, it actually does do OpenAPI specs for REST and even mock services and all that, so I'm delighted to share that it's actually relevant to this post! :^) What are you waiting for?
Your Scratch Pad data is safe and accessible.
It can be Migrated to a new Workspace, once you create an account, using the 'Cog Icon > Settings > Data > Migrate data' menu option.
Alternatively, it can be Exported from the Lightweight API Client(signed out version) using the 'Cog Icon > Settings > Data > Export data' menu options.
I'm assuming you work for Postman. I hope you know that because of this, as well as the account requirement, other REST tools are going to eat your lunch. I don't think this was a good move.
Ah, I follow. I was confused because a small, open-source extension should be sufficient to handle sending test requests. Sounds like they're doing something much bigger than that.
POSTman started as an extension; hence my confusion. I was wondering if there was a technical issue I was unaware of.
It falls apart instantly when you need to pass data from one endpoint to another or add any sort of logic like filtering through data - so any time you have non-trivial workloads where you don't want to spend half your time fighting against jq or shell.
`curl ... > out.json` then `curl ... -d out.json`. Wrap it in a shell script for quick iterations.
> filtering through data
`curl ... | jq | grep`. I don't know of any tool that will find what I'm after faster than the shell.
For bootstrapping and quick experiments curl is right there at my fingertips, no need to spin up an electron app, make a bunch of definitions and all that. When I want something more usable OpenAPI serves as stateful and interactive test environment and documentation at the same time.
I do agree curl can get a little verbose but create an alias: `alias jc='curl -H Content-Type: application/json` and using it is as simple as `jc $URL` for GET or `jc -X POST -d '{ ... }' $URL` for the rest of the methods.
I really recommend getting comfortable in the shell, it's amazing how productive it can be and becoming a bit of a lost art these days. All the tools are composable and working together it's so zen.
You don’t have to fight tools if you learn them, but I understand— as a fellow programmer— that you don’t always have time to learn them. However, it’s pretty easy to use pipes and tools like jq to do complex stuff.
While jq is powerful and I use it in scripts, it's one of the least intuitive languages I use, to the point I have to look up basically everything non-trivial.
It's not a bug to release a version which removed a massive chunk of functionality. It's intentionally fucking over their users who are not willing to create an account.
Weird. Mine doesn't, and it's been 8 days since that post. I even checked for updates, and I'm up to date. Maybe they reverted their bone head move? (I don't use it daily)
One nice thing about FOSS CLI tools is they're easy to script. While it's pretty tough to script general cases, I often find my workflows orbit around a handful of commands, and scripting often can improve the UX by a large margin. It does require tinkering a bit though.
Seriously, python with the requests lib in a jupyter notebook is always a nicer user experience than any REST API GUI, most importantly once it's grown a bit.
I have found Bruno (https://github.com/usebruno/bruno) to be a decent basic alternative with a nice bonus of being version control friendly, keep in mind that it's fresh and relatively unpolished though - for instance it doesn't ask you to save changes before closing the app.
The one thing I'm afraid of is that it's a single maintainer project, and while they are active now, I'm not sure how this is going to fare in a few months or so.
Glad to see alternatives but disappointed that Bruno does not support OpenAPI specification.
At my company, we hand-edit OpenAPI specs in YAML and it gets consumed by many tools that generate types[0], static analysis and dynamic checks[1]. The OpenAPI spec itself is linted[2]. And of course, Postman consumes OpenAPI.
Tools that are built on open standards will naturally see greater adoption over those that use proprietary formats.
