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Postman Now Supports gRPC

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Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#161

Post by capableweb »

throwaway984393 wrote: post #159
capableweb wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You've heard of the Unix philosophy? Small programs that do one thing well. Composeability, so you can combine programs to make new functionality. That makes sense in terms of CLI utilities where text/files is the standard input/output, or APIs where json/xml/format-of-today is the standard input/output, but how would you do this with GUI tools? I'd love it if there was a solution, but I'm not aware of one. Many su…

Linux GUI apps use DBUS to communicate between each other. (I'm not a fan of it but it's better than nothing)

As a comparison against traditional unix pipes (or even sockets), how does DBUS handle sending/receiving a lot of data? I always got the impression DBUS is more for notification style message passing, not actually for sending data, so you'd send a message saying "fetch the data from this socket" rather than "here's a bunch of data for you".

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#162

Post by dec0dedab0de »

CSMastermind wrote: post #104
matsemann wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't win. Most features added is because someone wants them. One person's bloat is another person's long sought feature. Like a quote about Microsoft Office: A user only ever uses about 10 percent of the features. The problem is that all users use different 10 percents.

This is solved in food products by differentiation. Someone likes the no pulp orange juice so they buy that and someone else likes the stuff with pulp in it so they buy that. Why not do the same thing with software? Release 10 different flavors of Microsoft Word and let people choose the one they want.

It's been almost 20 years since I compiled linux, but it was kind of like that. You would choose the features you needed and ignore the rest. Other compiled applications generally have options you can pass to make to enable certain features. Python readline comes to mind.

It would be interesting if we had a similar system for GUI applications. The interface would need to be generated to only show features that are included

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#163

Post by david38 »

capableweb wrote: post #86
lukevp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems unrealistic long term for any company to maintain one native app and an electron app across other platforms. Spotify did this for a while, but they eventually forced everyone onto the electron app. Something to keep in mind.

> It seems unrealistic long term for any company to maintain one native app and an electron app across other platforms Not sure if it's more or less unrealistic to have one native app per platform. > Spotify did this for a while, but they eventually forced everyone onto the electron app I don't think (but someone correct me if I'm wrong please) Spotify has ever been a Electron app. If I recall correctly they are inde…

Often apps don't have one app per platform, often it's just Mac or something. They get Electron so everyone can use it and then suddenly the Mac app has an equal number of users as Electron (or less) and then at that point justifying development becomes difficult.

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#164

Post by ProtocallDev »

If anyone is looking for a gRPC client which will automatically resolve imports between protos and also render structured input fields for each message, check out Protocall (https://protocall.dev - disclaimer, I'm the author).

I built it to solve my biggest pain points with existing tooling like BloomRPC and gRPCurl - they were difficult to use for anything more complicated than "Hello, World". I also couldn't find any tools that would let me send protobuf-encoded requests via HTTP/1.1 rather than gRPC - there are a couple options now, but as far as I know none of them support both that and gRPC.

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#165

Post by AtNightWeCode »

Left Postman a long time ago after all the stupid decisions. Never looked back. gRPC is a nice addition to Postman though. In contrary to what advocates of gRPC thinks, this kind of development is the key thing to bring gRPC to the wide audience. The lack of test tools for non-developers has been an obvious problem with gRPC. Most people should probably still not use gRPC since it is in most cases useless and causes a lot of problems.

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#166

Post by pas »

capableweb wrote: post #161
throwaway984393 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux GUI apps use DBUS to communicate between each other. (I'm not a fan of it but it's better than nothing)

As a comparison against traditional unix pipes (or even sockets), how does DBUS handle sending/receiving a lot of data? I always got the impression DBUS is more for notification style message passing, not actually for sending data, so you'd send a message saying "fetch the data from this socket" rather than "here's a bunch of data for you".

You can use DBus to call a remote procedure and pass the path of a temp file where the real data is.

(You can pass actual file descriptors too.)

That said DBus is pretty fast. Basically somewhere around 25-30% of TCP.

https://blogs.gnome.org/abustany/2010/05/20/ipc-performance-...

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#167

Post by panabee »

jonfk wrote: post #79

To add another data point, I also moved on from Postman a while ago. Similarly to several commentors here I had found it to have become bloated, slow and buggy imho. In my particular use case, I found the urlencoding when using oauth1 to be pretty buggy. It would sometimes not work on certain headers it generated. My team ended up moving to Paw but that has been a bit problematic since it only supports osx, so some t…

what other areas of the request process did you want to hook into?

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#168

Post by capableweb »

Mindstormy wrote: post #112
CSMastermind wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is solved in food products by differentiation. Someone likes the no pulp orange juice so they buy that and someone else likes the stuff with pulp in it so they buy that. Why not do the same thing with software? Release 10 different flavors of Microsoft Word and let people choose the one they want.

This sounds like a really bad idea. With orange juice it takes less than 30 seconds to differentiate the versions. If this was done with something like Microsoft Word you would probably have to spend the better part of a day teasing out exactly which features you needed or wanted. I think a semi relevant modern example would be how the release of hitman 3 worked out. They had to make a flow chart of how to buy the ri…

> They had to make a flow chart of how to buy the right copy of the game with the features you wanted

"They" makes it sound like IO Interactive (developers and publisher of Hitman) made that flow chart for people to use, but in reality it's community made by someone from Reddit.

And to be honest, it doesn't seem that complicated, seems like a joke flow chart to make it more complicated than what it is. These editions seems to exists (for the record, I have neither and first time I hear about them):

- Trilogy Premium Add-ons Bundle

- Trilogy Edition

- Standard Edition

- Deluxe Edition

- A DLC

Trilogy obviously is about the full series (1 to 3), and Deluxe edition contains "Deluxe Pack". Which one you want? Ok, want the DLC too? Ok.

It's really not that complicated.

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#169

Post by capableweb »

elcomet wrote: post #124
CSMastermind wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is solved in food products by differentiation. Someone likes the no pulp orange juice so they buy that and someone else likes the stuff with pulp in it so they buy that. Why not do the same thing with software? Release 10 different flavors of Microsoft Word and let people choose the one they want.

That does not work. People only use 10% of word, but this does not mean that you can partition all users in batch of "10% of features". If you want to satisfy everyone, you have to make every possible combination of "10% of word features". Which is impossible. So it's much easier to just combine all features in one product and try to give the user a good interface to find easily the feature they are looking for.

> If you want to satisfy everyone, you have to make every possible combination of "10% of word features". Which is impossible.

I remember Caddy used to have a "kitchen sink" packager or something like that available via their website, where you could pick and chose what features you'd want included.

Playing with the idea (I'm not saying it's a good idea or that I want it), Microsoft could offer something similar, where you tick boxes for what use-cases you want it to fit, and bundle it all together for you with a price per use-case.

I'd absolutely hate it, as I never know what I need in the future, but maybe for some people it'd make sense.

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#170

Post by jicea »

avel wrote: post #89
avel wrote: post #68

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 h…

Someone posted https://hurl.dev/ below. It looks like a command-line alternative to this, with a similar format, and support for assertions.

Hi, one of the maintainer of Hurl [1]. It is effectively basically just curl (we're using libcurl under the hood). I would say that we have added the ability to chain request (you could use curl in a shell script), and a bunch of assert (like jsonpath, xpath etc...) on response (which you could arguably do also with shell script).

We also wanted something text based, that could easily be integrated in a CI [2] for instance. We are using Hurl to test our web application (~2M unique visitors/month). Very happy with it currently, but there are really a lot of very good tools in this space (as we can see in these comments).

[1] https://hurl.dev

[2] https://hurl.dev/docs/tutorial/ci-cd-integration.html

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