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Re:Show HN: Open source Postman alternative with type safety by ta8645 on Wednesday September 06, 2023 @03:29AM (#37402257)
> I would argue the offering is actually very clear.

What is it?

Re:Show HN: Open source Postman alternative with type safety by jabbawookiees on Wednesday September 06, 2023 @03:41AM (#37402335)
My take: RecipeUI a Postman-like tool that offers convenient type safety and autocomplete on top of what Postman already does.

What is Postman? It's a tool that allows you to configure, save, and replay HTTP requests. It helps developers building backend server APIs, so they don't have to keep fiddling around with their frontend. In many greenfield projects, the frontend doesn't even exist yet and Postman is effectively the only way to easily test what you're working on.

The alternative to postman is writing custom Python/NodeJS/etc programs to send these requests or painfully doing it with curl and bash.

I think it's cool and I'll probably try it the next time I have to work on REST APIs.

Re:Show HN: Open source Postman alternative with type safety by contravariant on Wednesday September 06, 2023 @05:29AM (#37402959)
Honestly I'm still not entirely sold on the idea of Postman, for sending a simple HTTP request I find the python requests library a lot more intuitive to work with.

Then again I'm mostly looking at APIs to eventually use them in some other python script so perhaps my use case is not the best fit.

Unless the API does something weird you can do a lot worse than using curl and bash. I mean even using telnet (or openssl s_client) is not too bad if you're only doing a simple GET.

Re:Show HN: Open source Postman alternative with type safety by OtomotO on Wednesday September 06, 2023 @05:51AM (#37403100)
It definitely is. I am using curl and postman, but I never work(ed) in/with python apart from one course at university
Re:Show HN: Open source Postman alternative with type safety by JoBrad on Wednesday September 06, 2023 @08:26AM (#37404072)
Postman is great for sharing API collections with others, especially if they aren’t a developer. Adding type safety to it is a great way to provide hints for acceptable values.
Re:Show HN: Open source Postman alternative with type safety by floorballchamp on Wednesday September 06, 2023 @05:55AM (#37403130)
> on top of what Postman already does

The question was what that is.

"What does Foo do?" -- "Well just like what Bar does?" -- <no clue about Bar either>

Re:Show HN: Open source Postman alternative with type safety by zknowledge on Wednesday September 06, 2023 @06:08AM (#37403198)
Literally, the next 3 words from the quote answers your question.

> What is Postman? It's a tool that allows you to configure, save, and replay HTTP requests.