Ohh exciting. I've been using the postman chrome extension for years.
Was wondering what's different about the app. Looks like 2 main things:
They are pushing towards being more a part of your integration testing suite. The mac app gives you a command line runner, so you can run anything you want as part of your postman test suite.
Another huge benefit is that you can now monitor/intercept API traffic that you're running in development. With the chrome extension you'd previously have to use a proxy. Now the app handles it for you. Think - run your mobile app in an emulator, have postman monitor the requests. π
@mscccc Hey Mike! We made our integration testing suite completely free as part of the Mac app beta. Both these features are available in Chrome as well but with a native app, we have more control over the underlying OS layer and you will see a lot of new cool stuff here utilizing this freedom in the coming weeks. :)
Was literally just searching for a tool like this last week and couldn't believe it didn't exist. Seems like most companies build this themselves and customize it, but excited to try this out!
Thanks for the love folks! Founder here. We have been on Chrome for a while but we have a TON of stuff coming out for the Mac app. I'd recommend you check out:
1. Request chaining: Use Javascript to chain together HTTP requests and build end-to-end workflows for APIs.
2. Testing suite: You can write a complete integration testing suite and run it in the Collection Runner.
3. Proxy: Intercept HTTP traffic on phones and the desktop and convert them to Collections.
4. Cookies: Precise control over the cookies that are sent with requests. This had been a major feature request on the Postman Chrome app.
This tool has been a godsend for me and my team. I use it all the time to prove out concepts using APIs or to debug why my app isn't displaying something correctly. It's been a massive help and I couldn't work without it
Love the Chrome Extension, was always a bit of pain accessing it with multiple browser windows open, having it as native app will make that much better!
@chrismessina Thanks Chris! Founder here. We are super excited about the Mac app and this is just the beginning for us! Postman is coupled with our Cloud services too that let developers keep multiple Postman copies in sync, collaborate in a team in real-time and auto generate documentation too. Also, checkout Newman - Postman's command line companion for running tests and requests outside of Postman: https://www.getpostman.com/apps.
@noxowe I use paw even though my entire team just uses the postman app. I think it's a bias that primarily comes from which I used first, but Paw is quite an amazing app. The guy develops it for a living, actively responds to support and feature requests on twitter, and has been cultivating a really nice following. Generally speaking I prefer native OS X apps to google chrome apps, but I'll probably install postman now that it's native.
@bsmartt13 Luckily, I never needed to deal with support before so I can't comment on that but I really see the huge mounts of time he has put into Paw and I think it was worth each cent. I just don't know if he will abandon it on Postman's release or develop it forward and compete
@noxowe fully agreed. I can only hope they play nice and make it easy for teams which use both to export and import eachother cleanly. IIRC right now postman makes it really easy, paw less so.
@bsmartt13@noxowe Hey Billy! Paw is a great tool. The focus for Postman though is to be more than just a REST client (of course it does that really well!). We let you collaborate with your team in real-time through Postman Cloud, generate documentation along with the testing suite I mentioned on this page. We have documented the Collections format extensively and I hope more and more tools adopt it!
@noxowe@bsmartt13 Thanks for the kind words, we have a massive release coming very soon, and in a short time frame Paw will have team collaboration (done the right way), and more features :) β stay tuned! Btw, we're a little team now!
I'm a big fan of the Postman Chrome Extension. I'm really glad its coming it to mac as a native app. It makes API's so much simpler to design and using. Make sure an API works before you deploy it in your code. In fact I've used it on the @producthunt API. π
@gabriel__lewis@producthunt That's so cool to hear Gabriel! We just launched our "Run in Postman" partner program and I'd love to know if you'd like to be a part of it: http://blog.getpostman.com/2016/.... It let's API publishers import Postman Collections into the Postman app with a single click. Will get devs started in a flash rather than copy/pasting gobs of curl code! :rocket:
PlanetScale Boost