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Question: Do I miss something by not using Postman? My alternatives for development are "Edit and Resend" of a request (in Firefox) and plain old curl scripts for reusable examples.
The only nice feature is being able to paste a url, get parsed parameters, and then edit all the things using the UI. Other then that, its same old curl.
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It is unmaintained. This is the cost of devs focusing on corporate gains and not their craft.
Devs have to eat and if someone offers you a life altering amount of money to work on their hobby project, a lot of them would probably take it. It's hard to turn down something that might assure your family a comfortable life.
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640K ought to be enough for anyone.
- Bill Gates. And: The world does not need more than 4 computers. -Ken Olsen, or someone (in the mainframe days). (Both are alleged / apocryphal quotes. :)
I stopped using Postman when it magically started connecting to a central server for… nothing useful, really. I have no idea why people would design software this way, especially a development tool that should work with any web server, under any network condition (including fully offline against localhost). Now I just have a Makefile with a bunch of curl invocations, or Python tests with requests to match against exp…
> Now I just have a Makefile with a bunch of curl invocations There are several FOSS command line tools that can do this easier, e.g. https://httpie.io/cli
Ah, yes, the cloud-dependent tool that forces you to pay per seat and log in for any type of collaboration is down when their cloud provider is. Anyways, the folks have spoken, no need to double down. There are more than a dozen alternatives to it, and new ones are coming up. I'm helping build a new one. - Completely offline. - Gives the ability to build reusable blocks (headers, query params, etc) - Let's you docume…
The CEO committed to open-sourcing it, as well as to not monetize on anything that doesn't introduce operational costs to the team.
In the beginning, there was Postman, and we used it, and it was good. Then, Postman became enshittified, so we switched to Insomnia. Then, Insomnia became enshittified, so we switched to Bruno. Then, Bruno became enshittified, so now it's Yaak. Let's see how long it takes for one of these programs to break the cycle.
And each of those are just thin wrappers around curl I guess. We should be glad that some good free software could be produced in the past to serve as the foundation for today's greed.
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We use it a bit at our company. We have a collection file that includes a ton of requests with headers and body. Developers can with ease load that collection file and run it against their own server, and also quickly change to a different server with just a click. I guess a substitution would be a git repo with curl scripts and environment variables? We also have some non-tech people who use postman to run tests.
A closer replacement would be https://hurl.dev or the HTTP client built in to every JetBrains IDE + https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-cli.html#tes... >, depending on what other tools your org uses.
I stopped using Postman when it magically started connecting to a central server for… nothing useful, really. I have no idea why people would design software this way, especially a development tool that should work with any web server, under any network condition (including fully offline against localhost). Now I just have a Makefile with a bunch of curl invocations, or Python tests with requests to match against exp…
Pretty obvious why if you use the software. I get the whining, but teams need ways to share their complex workflows, and teams are where the money is for all dev focused software. That's who pays for all your tools to have free versions. People who use make and curl to jury rig some unshareable solution together that no-one else in their company would even bother trying to use aren't worth any money to companies.
Apps like Postman are the wrong tool for this purpose.
If you want to share workflows, let alone complex workflows, any automated test suite is far better suited for this purpose.
We are in the age of LLMs and coding agents, which make BDD-style test frameworks even more relevant, as they allow developers to implement the workflows, verify they work, and leave behind an enforceable and verifiable human-readable description of those workflows.