How is this different from Postman? It seems very similar, but Postman is free and has other really awesome features (like being able to export tests and run them in the command line).
The main thing for me was that it's a proper native app. It works really well, takes advantage of the native OS APIs and is a better product because of it.
It doesn't have to be 12x better. It only has to save you $45 worth of time more than a $5 alternative, or $50 more than a free alternative. Most engineers are paid on the order of $30-$150/hour, depending on whether full-time, contractor, level of experience, etc. So, it has to save about 1.5 hours over the alternatives to be worth the price.
I don't know if it does that, as I've never used it, and don't use macOS.
There are other things it could save instead of or in addition to time: Hassle, maybe it doesn't have any external dependencies or complicated setup; stress, maybe it works reliably while others are buggy and unreliable; etc.
Again, I don't know. And, I tend to choose OSS solutions, even when it costs me more time/hassle/stress. But, there's a number of reasons one might choose a more expensive tool that does roughly the same job as lower cost alternatives, and it might be the right economic decision to do so.
Hypernap may be a native app, but it's certainly not beautiful or fully featured. It uses the most basic interface elements thrown together in a messy soup. I have immense respect for people who manage to develop native apps, but when the interface looks like it was implemented as someone's very first experiment in XCode... well, there's a reason you don't pay much.
I don't understand why developers throw their arms in the air over pricing. Try out the app; if it has everything you will ever need out of such a tool and it greatly improves your productivity every single day... a one-time $50 payment is nothing. It's the cost of going out for dinner one evening.
That is a major advantage of postman, but the reality for me is that I use an API client like this when I'm building and API. I'm on my mac and Paw is the best, most productive option.
I've been giving feedback to the postman team and hope to see it continue to improve. The electron desktop app was a big step forward, but there is still lots of room to improve.
I purchased Paw about 6 months ago and used it heavily, until recently I have ran into multiple situations where it didn't properly include custom headers I specified into the request, and was causing odd errors that I assumed were the fault of the code I was testing (happened in multiple different languages/projects). I have since started using Postman, but would love to go back to Paw since I appreciated some if it's features (such as being able to save an API definition into the github repo for sharing with other devs)
EDIT - didn't realize this post was for Paw 3, which just became available. Installing now and excited to try it!
Interesting, this is the first time I've seen a domain with the .cloud extension. I wonder how many other companies are going to follow suit?
Regarding the app, Paw is friggin amazing. I was lucky to get it back when it was much cheaper, but it's definitely still worth the $49 even now. The team stuff is interesting too, as me and my guys share our exports all the time.
I've used Paw for a few years since I started getting inconsistent Postman results thanks to Chrome cookies, and I haven't looked back. It's really a fantastic tool that is part of my daily life as an API guy. The dev, Micha, is super helpful via email and has even incorporated feedback when the app didn't work the way I expected (like sending request body on GET). I would honestly buy it again if updates weren't free.
I'm with you on this, the wide use of the word "API" to designate Web/HTTP APIs is wrong. But we have to admit that if you talk with someone saying "we're build an API that does X", everyone will understand it's a web service, not a C++ library ;) So in the end words are just ways to communicate ideas…so we went for the simpler "API" wording. -Micha (from Paw)
Paw is a really great product, I've been using it for a long time now. I _really_ wish they would combine this with traffic capture - similar to Fiddler on Windows. Charles does the trick, but it's a mess to set up for proxying HTTPS traffic.
Traffic capture is definitely something we are looking into. Through to be honest it would most likely be a companion app rather than directly embedded within Paw --matthaus (@hishnash) Backend syncing dev at paw.cloud
I've used Postman on and off but I just find the UI more burdensome than it's worth and use one of the more simple rest clients and curl for when I'm really trying to string together some complicated requests.
Paw looks gorgeous and very nicely featured. Let's see how it works on Monday against the Niantic APIs :)
Postman is decent. But it takes too many click to do things like managing environment variables. Then there's the double-scrolling issue when reading responses which is atrocious; the response text is placed in a scrollable field - and that field has the parent window which also scrollable. Having to operate nested scrollbars to read every single response - which is the most frequent task you are performing - ruins the entire application.
I hadn't heard of Paw, but based on the screenshots and positive reviews in the comments, I'll be giving the trial a go. Fingers crossed!
For those who want something that works really well, with a very nice UI and is free, I would highly recommend Insomnia for Google Chrome (it functions as a standalone app outside of Chrome).
The latest version (3.0) appears to be in beta, but 2.x is stable and I've been using it for at least a year. It doesn't have cloud/team syncing (at least in 2.x), but it does allow you to export request groups as JSON which can be shared/versioned. For being free and cross-platform, that seems good enough for me.
Postman went through a similar progression. For me I need team/cloud syncing that goes beyond shipping around a JSON file. Although it looks like the new PAW team syncing might be leveraging git behind the scenes.
Why do these things insist on launching in their own window? This got uninstalled just as fast as Postman. There's no reason for those things to force an app icon and a separate window.
Bought Paw on the Mac App Store a while back. I wonder if this update will come to me as well, or that I need to repurchase. For now I can't find Paw 3 there at all; perhaps they stopped using the MAS?
I've owned Paw for a while, and I find it much more user-friendly than Postman. It's not for everyone, sure, but the developer has put in good work and you won't regret a purchase.
Yeah I went hunting for a new API software for the same reason.. I wound up purchasing Paw for my team. The big selling point for me was the ability to define a request, and then use data from that request in other requests (the dynamic data). And... the UI is wildly better IMO. Thanks to Paw for making a great piece of software that's not a pain to use!
So, I'm not trolling - I don't like UIs if they don't provide more functionality than data entry, I think they are counter productive. So, seriously, what advantages does it provide, beyond being 'accessible' to people with cli allergies. I'm curious.
Also, we're working on a powerful API format transformer that we will release more officially soon, but it's already on GitHub: https://github.com/luckymarmot/api-flow That will allow us to release exporters for Swagger, RAML, HAR soon as well as formats of other clients like Postman and DHC Client.
We are making over half of the available extensions, it's a good way to ship small features to users that need them without a full blown update. Also it keeps the app simple for users that only need to key feature set. Check out our GitHub: https://github.com/luckymarmot We have someone full time on the extention now, in addtion to other team mebembers spending time as well (disclaimer member of Paw team here..)
Disagree. If you implement every possible feature as a first-class deployed feature, your software is going to be (1) huge and (2) so confusing.
Implement core features, then implement a great API for 3P (or your own!) developers to add rich feature sets to the app that some demographics might find helpful.
Looks cool :-). If there is any Emacs hackers looking for a way to make and document api calls, I recommend Restclient-mode[0]. Emacs Rocks! Episode on Restclient-mode[1].
I'm a pretty heavy RESTful API user (feels like what I spend most of my day doing a lot of times), a pretty heavy Paw user and pretty well versed with its feature set, and on the CLI side, curl | jq. So I think I can actually probably answer this pretty well.
Paw helps me compose arbitrary calls faster. It also helps me just keep track of and search API calls really easily, just by searching the request list. I have an API call right there, with the JSON body, and I don't have to pull up the API docs. It's just way better than having a bunch of little shell scripts for these API calls, and better than having a big, ugly, stupid text file full of API calls, because I can execute them, and it really helps in composing them.
It just helps with a lot of little random stuff. Like, if you tell it you're doing a JSON-body form post, and you've got quote marks in there, it'll get those quotes escaped right to get it embedded in the JSON.
If you're a heavy RESTful API user, I'd say just give it a try for a month and see if you feel like it's worth it. I thought it was.
There's command history, and if you're executing calls multiple times in a row and might want to see what changed between them later, the history is great. You can scroll back in your terminal, sure, but you tend to close terminal windows and lose the output. It just keeps everything glued together, it's really much more coherent than trying to throw around a lot of disparate API calls in a terminal with curl (or httpie.)
That being said, I do find it to be complementary to curl | jq. For one, the "keypath" filter in the http exchange pane of Paw doesn't take anything close to a full jq-like syntax. I pretty frequently use the "curl" code generator (it's got an httpie code generator as well, but it doesn't seem that one is as good at shell-quoting edge cases. Not sure who maintains that extension and if it's open-source, but if you love it, you might be able to help fix it if it interferes with your workflow) to copy out the call I composed, and even executed in Paw, so that I can do some jq mangling. (Or i could just copy out the json body if I didn't want to re-execute the call.)
If slinging RESTful API calls is a significant part of your day, you're almost certainly going to find value in something like Paw. It's got a 1 month free trial. I tried it, and didn't really plan to buy it, but a month ended, and I was using it and liked it.
I love using Paw. I'm no longer in the building phase of my service, but when I was defining my API and testing endpoints, Paw was critical in the process.
My main feature request (and I'm not sure if any competitor does this, so please inform me if it exists somewhere):
While Paw allows me to export code, which is cool and all, it would be very interesting to allow me to compose workflows, like, say Automator in macOS, including assertions, so that I could essentially compose and export integration tests with Paw. It'd be neat to see some more generally API-definition features hit Paw, or maybe a companion app that plays nicely with Paw to do the definition half of things, compatible with Swagger and whatnot.
Clearly not a well-thought-out idea, but I think there's space in Paw's domain for some form of what I'm talking about.
We have actually two ideas in this area. First, as you mentioned, assertion testing. We've recently published a workaround (as a joke, but it's actually working :D) https://blog.paw.cloud/posts/secret-path-to-paw-assertions/ but a real alternative is coming next.
Second, we are currently brainstorming around the idea of a good automation app. So somehow the two ideas may merge. We're not sure yet what would make sense for automation, but for assertions testing, for sure it's in the pipeline!
Being able to potentially export out to JMeter format (or generate Gatling Scala scenarios) would be awesome, because the JMeter GUI is so horribly awful.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadhttp://gethypernap.com/
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hypernap/id795069997
But no, it's not a good team solution.
And I'd agree that Paw is subjectively more "nice", but I'm not sure I'd agree it's 12x more nice...
If it were $9.99 instead of $49.99, I would have already purchased it. As it stands, I'm sticking with Hypernap, which gets the job done for my needs.
I don't know if it does that, as I've never used it, and don't use macOS.
There are other things it could save instead of or in addition to time: Hassle, maybe it doesn't have any external dependencies or complicated setup; stress, maybe it works reliably while others are buggy and unreliable; etc.
Again, I don't know. And, I tend to choose OSS solutions, even when it costs me more time/hassle/stress. But, there's a number of reasons one might choose a more expensive tool that does roughly the same job as lower cost alternatives, and it might be the right economic decision to do so.
I don't understand why developers throw their arms in the air over pricing. Try out the app; if it has everything you will ever need out of such a tool and it greatly improves your productivity every single day... a one-time $50 payment is nothing. It's the cost of going out for dinner one evening.
I've been giving feedback to the postman team and hope to see it continue to improve. The electron desktop app was a big step forward, but there is still lots of room to improve.
EDIT - didn't realize this post was for Paw 3, which just became available. Installing now and excited to try it!
Regarding the app, Paw is friggin amazing. I was lucky to get it back when it was much cheaper, but it's definitely still worth the $49 even now. The team stuff is interesting too, as me and my guys share our exports all the time.
For now though, I'm super excited about the new Paw app.
EDIT: Wow! Just saw that the upgrade to v3 is free for v2 users! Nice surprise!
Paw looks really good. I'll definitely give that a try, especially if the team sharing features are good.
Paw looks gorgeous and very nicely featured. Let's see how it works on Monday against the Niantic APIs :)
I hadn't heard of Paw, but based on the screenshots and positive reviews in the comments, I'll be giving the trial a go. Fingers crossed!
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/insomnia-rest-clie...
Though, it looks like it is in beta, and I don't see any way to do cloud/team syncing.
So far, 3.0 ditches the Chrome dependency and provides a much nicer UI, but more advanced features like sync and versioning are in the works!
~ Gregory
GJ, Apple. You're alienating everybody and going back to the cesspool you wallowed in throughout the '90s.
Jony Ive's pathetic, regressive designs should launch Apple's coffin ship nicely in the consumer realm, as well.
You know the difference, quit trolling.
But anyway, there's already a HAR importer, you can install it here as an extension https://paw.cloud/extensions/HARImporter
Also, we're working on a powerful API format transformer that we will release more officially soon, but it's already on GitHub: https://github.com/luckymarmot/api-flow That will allow us to release exporters for Swagger, RAML, HAR soon as well as formats of other clients like Postman and DHC Client.
If you're curious about writing an exporter/generator though here are some steps: https://paw.cloud/docs/extensions/create-code-generator
(Disclaimer, Paw guy here…)
Implement core features, then implement a great API for 3P (or your own!) developers to add rich feature sets to the app that some demographics might find helpful.
[0] https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el
[1] http://emacsrocks.com/e15.html
Paw helps me compose arbitrary calls faster. It also helps me just keep track of and search API calls really easily, just by searching the request list. I have an API call right there, with the JSON body, and I don't have to pull up the API docs. It's just way better than having a bunch of little shell scripts for these API calls, and better than having a big, ugly, stupid text file full of API calls, because I can execute them, and it really helps in composing them.
It just helps with a lot of little random stuff. Like, if you tell it you're doing a JSON-body form post, and you've got quote marks in there, it'll get those quotes escaped right to get it embedded in the JSON.
If you're a heavy RESTful API user, I'd say just give it a try for a month and see if you feel like it's worth it. I thought it was.
There's command history, and if you're executing calls multiple times in a row and might want to see what changed between them later, the history is great. You can scroll back in your terminal, sure, but you tend to close terminal windows and lose the output. It just keeps everything glued together, it's really much more coherent than trying to throw around a lot of disparate API calls in a terminal with curl (or httpie.)
That being said, I do find it to be complementary to curl | jq. For one, the "keypath" filter in the http exchange pane of Paw doesn't take anything close to a full jq-like syntax. I pretty frequently use the "curl" code generator (it's got an httpie code generator as well, but it doesn't seem that one is as good at shell-quoting edge cases. Not sure who maintains that extension and if it's open-source, but if you love it, you might be able to help fix it if it interferes with your workflow) to copy out the call I composed, and even executed in Paw, so that I can do some jq mangling. (Or i could just copy out the json body if I didn't want to re-execute the call.)
If slinging RESTful API calls is a significant part of your day, you're almost certainly going to find value in something like Paw. It's got a 1 month free trial. I tried it, and didn't really plan to buy it, but a month ended, and I was using it and liked it.
My main feature request (and I'm not sure if any competitor does this, so please inform me if it exists somewhere):
While Paw allows me to export code, which is cool and all, it would be very interesting to allow me to compose workflows, like, say Automator in macOS, including assertions, so that I could essentially compose and export integration tests with Paw. It'd be neat to see some more generally API-definition features hit Paw, or maybe a companion app that plays nicely with Paw to do the definition half of things, compatible with Swagger and whatnot.
Clearly not a well-thought-out idea, but I think there's space in Paw's domain for some form of what I'm talking about.
Although it looks like Paw has potential for something similar with its extensions. It already has some sort of javascript availability.
https://medium.com/ios-os-x-development/make-your-app-extens...
Second, we are currently brainstorming around the idea of a good automation app. So somehow the two ideas may merge. We're not sure yet what would make sense for automation, but for assertions testing, for sure it's in the pipeline!
-Micha from Paw