Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Postman Now Supports gRPC

blog.postman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 216 posts

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#61

Post by kaszanka »

lucideer wrote: post #54
paozac wrote: post #5

I used to like Postman, when it was a simple browser extension. I basically used it as a curl gui. Now > Postman is an API platform for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs—faster. I guess I’m no longer their target user. Back to curl/httpie.

I used to like Postman until it locked me out of my locally-stored data while I was offline (testing my own applications on localhost) for an extended period , I found out that it phones home constantly (cannot be disabled) & locks you out if it fails. The developers stating they had no intention of changing this for "security reasons" before closing the Github issue sealed the deal.

This sounds unbelievable but it seems to be true? https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/10...

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#62

Post by Nihilartikel »

I've tried Postman quite a few times in the past - but for my use cases of exercising APIs or doing ad-hoc automation, it's always been much less frustrating to reach for a Jupyter notebook with the 'requests' library.

In the end it also leaves me with a git'able artifact to share with others.

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#63

Post by robofanatic »

adhoc_slime wrote: post #14

I have a meta question to ask, in threads like these where big products announce new features or big funding I always see commentors lamenting bloated software or it having too many features, not doing the one simple thing you want it to do, etc. To me it seems the only trajectory of developers building products is to add new features, its how we justify keeping ourselves around most of the time. So what my question…

if you want to survive in silicon valley you need to show growth in terms of revenue or at-least the number of users on your platform. Thats a slippery slope for products like postman.

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#65

Post by pm90 »

adhoc_slime wrote: post #14

I have a meta question to ask, in threads like these where big products announce new features or big funding I always see commentors lamenting bloated software or it having too many features, not doing the one simple thing you want it to do, etc. To me it seems the only trajectory of developers building products is to add new features, its how we justify keeping ourselves around most of the time. So what my question…

This is an excellent question.

What I’ve noticed is that developers are incredibly annoyed when their tools don’t work well. Developers use their tools a lot, and when a tool starts “misbehaving” (resource hungry, sporadic failure, non ergonomic design etc) they are exposed to that failure constantly. This constant exposure can create intense feelings (either love or hatred) and nowhere to express them, so it will spill out on slack and on HN threads (eg count yourself lucky if you’ve worked somewhere that nobody has ranted about terraform).

So take these criticisms with a grain of salt. The creators of tools and the users aren’t always aligned on the most important thing to do next and you only have so much money and time to execute on as a company so you have to make trade offs.

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#66

Post by zimpenfish »

anyfactor wrote: post #45
mattbuilds wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to use Postman but now I prefer to just build my own scripts in Python. I use the requests library and can setup things however I want.

Same here. I am not sure where would I even use postman for. I essentially would wait 3-5 minutes to have postman initialized, be greeted with a dialogue box for an update or something, drop a json file for the headers and skim through the output. But it takes seconds to get up and running with requests-html. And it can do anything Postman can do and more. I have no idea how people in organizations use postman though…

> I am not sure where would I even use postman for.

It's really handy for generating test suites to hand to people who don't necessarily have the skills to write Python / node / whatever code. Have worked at places where certain changes needed a Postman collection alongside for people to manually verify that it works.

(Also handy for un-coder people to make test suites, obvs.)

(Also handy as a quick-and-dirty "view this data via the API" when you don't yet have a web UI etc.)

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#67

Post by thcyron »

evanmoran wrote: post #57
thcyron wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re on the Mac, you might want to give Grip ( https://gripgrpc.dev ) a chance. It’s a native client for gRPC. (Disclosure: I’m the author.)

Looks great! How’s the reception so far? Many of our APIs have some streaming, is that something on your roadmap?

It’s definitely on the roadmap. Out of curiosity, do you use client/server streaming or bidirectional streaming?

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#68

Post by avel »

As I have also been frustrated with the direction Postman has taken, I have a great alternative to suggest, if the only thing you want to do is fire requests on demand easily and do not need automated testing.

The VS Code Rest Client extension https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re... is great for testing and debugging APIs.

You create a "my_request.http" file that contains something like

  POST https://example.com/comments HTTP/1.1
  content-type: application/json

  {
    "name": "sample",
    "time": "Wed, 21 Oct 2015 18:27:50 GMT"
  }
First line is the method and url, then headers, then a newline, then the request body.

Hit ctrl+alt+p, the request is sent and you see the response in a side pane. Everything is encoded and decoded properly.

You can organize your tests under multiple files and folders.

I cannot recommend this extension enough, it has made my life so much easier.

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#70

Post by karolsputo »

I'v really had it with Postman. I don't get the priorities. Slow and sometimes confusing and auto-saving the configuration is still impossible(!) and I just keep loosing % of work done every single day. [0]

Glad to see lots of comment with alternatives here.

[0] https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/81...

Post reply on HN