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Show HN: I created Postwoman, an online, open-source API request builder

indiehackers.com

51–60 of 110 posts

Re: Show HN: I created Postwoman, an online, open-source API request builder

#51
post #48
post #44

This is probably the worst website I have ever used. Why does it have a progress bar, why is everything slow, why is it not simply a html page. What is going on with these people. Also, author quote : >I use a low-end PC and can't possibly afford to run another Electron app But proceeds to create more slow running web stuff. Okay. Is it just me or does this just seem like such a strange behavior?

Even by HN standards this seems like an excessive level of cynicism for a bog standard blog post format.

Well, it _is_ 5.4 MB of data for a short text-only blog post. Even by today's web standards this seems like an excessive amount of bloat.

Re: Show HN: I created Postwoman, an online, open-source API request builder

#52
post #44

This is probably the worst website I have ever used. Why does it have a progress bar, why is everything slow, why is it not simply a html page. What is going on with these people. Also, author quote : >I use a low-end PC and can't possibly afford to run another Electron app But proceeds to create more slow running web stuff. Okay. Is it just me or does this just seem like such a strange behavior?

Are you talking about the indiehackers website? That's not made by the author of the post

I'm aware, that was a different point of criticism. I apologize if that wasn't clear.

Re: Show HN: I created Postwoman, an online, open-source API request builder

#54
post #44

This is probably the worst website I have ever used. Why does it have a progress bar, why is everything slow, why is it not simply a html page. What is going on with these people. Also, author quote : >I use a low-end PC and can't possibly afford to run another Electron app But proceeds to create more slow running web stuff. Okay. Is it just me or does this just seem like such a strange behavior?

Are you talking about the indiehackers website? That's not made by the author of the post

The author could have picked a more suitable place to make an announcement. This is so hypocritical it's actually pretty funny.

Re: Show HN: I created Postwoman, an online, open-source API request builder

#55

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Insomnia. https://insomnia.rest/ It's an excellent tool that allows defining workspaces and even sharing sets of routes with members of your team. It's one of my favourite tools.

I installed this yesterday after having a strange issue with Postman eating an environment variable and spitting out an undefined request body. Surely a small issue, but really enjoying insomnia since. I'm also writing some automated tests that work mostly in http requests, but also do some grey box setup / inspection (of the queue, database, pre-create an account, etc). It got me thinking, it would be great to be able to mix that test logic with requests and use insomnia (or something like it) as a gui for test writing / debugging (when I can stay at a high level). I'm sure this is being done in many ways now, so I"m eager to research it a bit more when I can afford the time.

Re: Show HN: I created Postwoman, an online, open-source API request builder

#56

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Insomnia. https://insomnia.rest/ It's an excellent tool that allows defining workspaces and even sharing sets of routes with members of your team. It's one of my favourite tools.

I've used Insomnia for a while and absolutely love it. It's become an essential tool in my development process.

Re: Show HN: I created Postwoman, an online, open-source API request builder

#57
post #25

After Postman lost all my saved queries after an upgrade I switched to Insomnia - https://insomnia.rest/ and am quite happy with it.

I'm curious to know what gives you the confidence that Insomnia won't lose your saved data? Are you paying the premium for the data sync?

Not OP, but since Insomnia is a native app, it'll probably store its data and preferences in ~/Library. That is of course backed up via Time Machine.

Re: Show HN: I created Postwoman, an online, open-source API request builder

#58

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Insomnia. https://insomnia.rest/ It's an excellent tool that allows defining workspaces and even sharing sets of routes with members of your team. It's one of my favourite tools.

Can you comment on the I/O of documentation from it? Ie, I hate how Postman and friends want to be the nexus / saas of my products API documentation. I want to work with something in a common format, like OpenAPI, RAML or BlueprintAPI. These HTTP clients are nice, but I want them to be a tool, not required. Thoughts?

I've used them all: Postman, Insomnia, Paw, and other online web apps. Unfortunately none come close to being usable for large APIs imo. Some of the problems I faced off the top of my head (it's almost 2 years ago now since I tried them all though, but I haven't seen much change to be honest):

Insomnia: doesn't really have any support for documentation stuff. It is just an HTTP client that if you share your workspace with your team, is some kind of documentation. But you cannot share this outside of your organisation.

Postman: their documentation implementation seems one of the better ones, but Postman itself just isn't very DRY. For example we have a slightly different authentication scheme which isn't supported so we had to add a simple Javascript snippet to each request, but keeping all of them updated is impossible. I personally also wasn't a big fan of their client and it's not very user-friendly imo.

Paw: honestly pretty good. I asked them a few years ago to implement this and keep me posted. They eventually implemented some documentation stuff, but it's proprietary and using a plugin to convert to RAML or something else is a pain. When I used it, it also wasn't very expansive. It also faces the same problem as Insomnia: you are not able to share it outside your team. Though it also requires everyone to buy Paw and own a Mac. I switched to Linux a few years ago and so don't use my account anymore, that I paid for.

OpenAPI/Swagger: OpenAPI itself is great, but the website GUI that Swagger converts it to is basically useless for large APIs. You cannot nest anything and it is not very good for public documentation.

RAML: I personally love this syntax the most. Though there barely is any support for it. You cannot find any mature library or application that can convert it to actual usable documentation pages. It's also honestly a big pain to write all of the documentation at once.

BlueprintAPI: this is just way too barebones. I immediately stopped using it after trying it.

There were some others I tried, none really noteworthy. It's been a while as well so it's possible that some of my opinions are out of date.

Re: Show HN: I created Postwoman, an online, open-source API request builder

#59

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Insomnia. https://insomnia.rest/ It's an excellent tool that allows defining workspaces and even sharing sets of routes with members of your team. It's one of my favourite tools.

I've been using Insomnia since I had some issues with Postman, and I have not looked back.

Re: Show HN: I created Postwoman, an online, open-source API request builder

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably lower memory usage due to not running in a separate process. On a low-end PC this is a completely valid concern. Chrome is memory hungry. Running one instance might be viable. Running 2, 3 or 6 probably isn't (and you can always choose a less memory-hungry browser).

If performances are a concern I would build it in QT, not Javascript. Just opening Firefox eats like 400 MB ram on my PC !

If you're developing a web application...isn't firefox already open?
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