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Postman Now Supports gRPC

blog.postman.com

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Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#141

Post by souldeux »

binwiederhier wrote: post #93
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…

TIL about the intellij http client. Thank you for mentioning that. It looks awesome.blike Postman, but built-in to the IDE I have open anyway. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-c... https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/exploring-http-syntax.ht...

This is awesome, I had no idea you could do this. And with gRPC built right in!

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#142

Post by wackget »

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.

RESTER on Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rester/

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#143

Post by jkbr »

capableweb wrote: post #83
skrebbel wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And VC funding!

Oh, that's really unfortunate, I really like httpie. I wonder how long time it'll take for them to end up trying to extract as much value from each user as possible...

HTTPie founder here. These are valid concerns. There are two parts to this: 1/ What happens with HTTPie for Terminal, and 2/ how HTTPie for Web & Desktop and the overall platform will look like.

1/ HTTPie for Terminal will always be open-source and obviously free. The difference is that now we’re able to pay a talented developer to work on the project full-time (the recent 3.0 release is a result of that).

2/ We’re building a new platform with the same principles that made HTTPie for Terminal successful in mind: uncompromising simplicity, focus on productivity, and delightful user experience. We’re in the same space as Postman, but the idea is to be anything like. We’re striving to become what Linear is to Jira, Vercel to AWS, Figma to Adobe, etc. That is, to offer a much simpler and more focused product. Premium services for companies will be a natural extension of the single-player mode, and all incentives will be aligned in a way that doesn’t cannibalize the core experience.

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#144

Post by mastazi »

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…

> some team members are also using insomnia which doesn't seem to be much better in my opinion.

In my experience Insomnia suffers from some of the same bugs that affect Postman[1], but at least they don't do the scummy things that Postman does, for example locking you out of your _personal_ Postman account if your ex employer forgets to pay their business subscription (if anyone at Postman is reading this: that's the reason I left and will never come back).

PS I swear that some time ago I saw that Paw was now available for Linux and Windows as well, but I just went to their website and it still says "exclusively built on macOS", I'm really confused now.

[1] e.g.both Postman and Insomnia break when you import multiple API keys https://swagger.io/docs/specification/authentication/api-key...

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#145

Post by evanmoran »

thcyron wrote: post #67
evanmoran wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Server streaming, though I'm not sure how representative we are. We have servers that use streaming for watching for real-time changes. Currently using BloomRPC, if that helps

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#146

Post by a85 »

Postman founder here. Thank you HN community for highlighting this feature. We have been seeing gRPC usage exploding especially in microservices driven architectures and we are looking forward to the feedback we get on the feature.

A few other observations on comments that I read through:

1. Postman leans towards adding UI affordances instead of hiding them. This can irritate experienced developers at times who already know the complexities of HTTP or other protocols but that is really how new developers find their way around. So while it is attractive to have 1000 options hidden behind a command line interface, nobody uses 995 of those features. We are getting better at building experiences for both experienced and new developers. Also, I don’t believe reading man pages of git or curl is a better experience.

2. Performance is a huge area for improvement. More to come in subsequent releases this year.

3. Our roadmap is community driven: https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues. Raising more investment helps us do more. We have built a business model around doing the maximum for every developer on the planet while also providing value to companies so we can charge for it and continue development. I find it fair that companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on salaries can pay some money for improving their productivity by spending in developer tools.

4. API Development is a huge and growing area and developers are spending more and more time working with APIs rather than their IDEs. API Design, documentation, and testing are areas that a large number of developers tell us they wish they had better tooling for. Most of their time is spend pointlessly in trying to figure out how an API works (in some cases whether an API even exists). We decided to take Postman in those areas even though paradoxically it might lead to “less” Postman usage. (The faster people figure out an API the fewer number of calls they have to send)

5. Finally, it is good to see here a call for fewer features which we insist internally as well. Unfortunately at some point some part of the community is upset that we are NOT adding features (just see the gRPC thread on our issue tracker!). We don’t see issues to remove features as much as we have requests to fulfill. We do remove features consciously but it is a hard problem, so we default to adding them slowly.

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#147

Post by a85 »

lucideer wrote: post #132
cloverich wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its in issue in the sibling comment. The suggested work-around is to not sign in at all.

For further context: I'm not sure if this has changed but at that time signing in seemed* to be required (there's some discussions in the ticket about confusion in the UI about this so in retrospect UX dark patterns were likely at play). However, while it may have been possible to make ad hoc requests without an account, it didn't seem to be possible to save request collections locally without sign in.

That is incorrect. You can save requests inside Collections in the Scratchpad and send requests without an account.

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#148

Post by cloudrkt »

judge2020 wrote: post #77
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…

Can it do substitution with some sort of application-based KV store? The main reason I used a rest client like Insomnia is so that I can reference secrets like {{ client_secret }} or {{ api_key }} and have a change to the value in the KV store reflect for every request.

Yes it supports variables, don't know about KV store, see: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re...

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#149

Post by atarian »

a85 wrote: post #146

Postman founder here. Thank you HN community for highlighting this feature. We have been seeing gRPC usage exploding especially in microservices driven architectures and we are looking forward to the feedback we get on the feature. A few other observations on comments that I read through: 1. Postman leans towards adding UI affordances instead of hiding them. This can irritate experienced developers at times who alrea…

Thoughts on having native clients for Mac/Windows?

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#150

Post by a85 »

soraminazuki wrote: post #52

On a related note, I'm wondering if there are plans for updating httpbin. The httpbin repo was transferred to the Postman organization somewhere between January and March of 2019 [1]. The last commit was made on November 2018 [2] and it's currently suffering from outdated Python dependencies. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190322170311/https://github.co... [2]: https://github.com/postmanlabs/httpbin

I'll look into it. Thanks for pointing it out!
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