Paw – HTTP and REST API Tester for Mac | Hacker News Reader

Paw – HTTP and REST API Tester for Mac

luckymarmot.com

154 pointsdavidbarker50 comments

We use Postman[0] for all our API testing. Postman has Jetpacks which is great way to write tests for any kind of APIs. Here's a recent blogpost on their blog - http://blog.getpostman.com/index.php/2014/03/07/writing-auto....

To top it all, the team just released Newman[1] which is a free and open-source command line collection / test runner for APIs that can be directly integrated into your build system.

[0] - http://getpostman.com

[1] - http://github.com/a85/Newman

I see you've committed to Newman. Are you working with Postman?

Anyone moaning about a $20 pricetag for software this sophisticated: how much do you spend on food in a day?

On the other hand, I'm going to moan about how this isn't cross platform. I would dish out $20 for a Linux version in a heartbeat... ;)

Honestly, I'm a bit amazed. HN was falling over itself talking about fresh $5 sourdough loafs (which are about $1 at my local bakery) and a piece of high quality software gets heeing and hawing at $20?

it looks like a cleaner, nicer version of cocoa-rest-client (opensource, free) + code generation

> https://code.google.com/p/cocoa-rest-client/

I just bought this yesterday actually. Hands down the best app for this use case, and $20 is a steal when you weigh that cost against the value of maintaining your own sanity.

Using this with ElasticSearch is almost fun.

This looks pretty terrific. The price point does have me pretty reluctant to purchase it though.

I did want to mention in this thread that the cli utility 'httpie' has been terrific since I found it a couple weeks ago. https://github.com/jakubroztocil/httpie

The time limited version was horribly broken for my short test on 10.9.2. Gave up after 5 minutes.

Problems: * Could not add URL params * Request sent, no response output * Could not modify headers

Basically the UI was so broken that I couldn't do anything with it unfortunately. Maybe the paid for version works - but not going to plunk down $20 when, in my case, the Chrome tools work far better.

When did you give it a try? I bought it after using it for the full trial period and I never had an issue with either version. Pretty sure there's just a login on app launch that checks if you've paid, there's no difference between free and paid versions at all.

This makes me not want to use this product: "One day VIM was replaced by TextMate and Sublime."

Really?

If I had to put money on who'll be around in ten years, I know who I'd go with.

Ha, it's funny that I don't actually have any idea from this comment who you would put your money on. I would take the vim side of that bet directly against sublime, but perhaps not against something-like-sublime.

Vim was released in 1991 and is still incredibly popular today. Compare that with the myriad other editors (I'm looking at you TextMate and Sublime) which come and go. OP's money is on Vim and so is mine.

Textmate was released about a decade ago, so I guess we're measuring the staying power of technologies in quarter centuries now? :)

If you include Vim's direct lineage, which may or may not be fair, you can add another decade and change to that.

http://longbets.org/

I downloaded the free trial and gave it a quick workout with some of my favorite REST URLs. Overall I like the look and feel of it, but the lack of font control is a big problem for me. As I get older small, dark gray fonts on a light gray just isn't comfortable for me.

It looks like a great tool to generate cURL commands as well as Ruby code, and the S3 integration looks very useful. I agree that $20 looks a little pricy at first, but if you develop/use REST APIs everyday, then this is cheap for a good tool that saves you time.

Great app. I've been using it for over a year, and I can tell that from noob developers to VIM jedis, this Mac app is one of the best dev tool I know on OS X.

This looks impressive. Sadly it wants to harvest my email address for the free trial, so I didn't bother as I find that overly intrusive. I'm also concerned about desktop software that requires a "login" for no good reason, as this can result in the software no longer working when the online portal is unavailable or shut down.

If you get it from the Mac App Store, there is no need to give an email address...

I don't see a free trial there.

This is one of the worst apps for Mac I've ever seen. The user experience is abhorrent.

It starts you off with a single request and no clear idea how to edit anything but the name. I stumbled around to find that the view at the top right is what I needed.

I then made an environment and 2 variables, HOST and PORT (like I do in Postman) and placed those into the URL for the request. Made the request... no response. Opening the bottom panel reveals that the variables have been ignored.

Also, click anything wrong while editing a request and now the middle panel doesn't reflect the left panel. I'm now looking at editing a request with my custom variables on the left, but the right panel has an empty box.

Last but not least, when I try to type into that empty box the whole app crashes.

I don't get it. This must have been rushed out to make a quick buck.

The App Store description calls this "Paw – The missing HTTP Client for OS X".

Why do we keep describing apps as "missing" from an OS? Surely we're not implying that an OS should ship with all these different tools, right?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22the+missing%22+*+from+OSX (not the best search but it shows a few. In my mind I seem to recall having read this a lot though)

Also, the app looks great. I'm using RESTed right now and looks like this does all the things I wish RESTed would do.

It's been standard for longer than I've been alive to overload $OS_NAME to mean all of the following:

kernel

kernel + default userland

Kernel + default userland + kernel vendor add-ons

kernel + default userland + kernel vendor add-ons + ecosystem software

Also, since linux gained traction OS can frequently be interchanged with distribution of a kernel + userland + packaging tools + software repository + ecosystem, in various ways, and as above.

Not sure why you decided that OSX means strictly:

kernel + default userland

Fair point, it's just how I interpreted it, others may read that differently.

I was just focused on the "missing" term, to me that implies something that was once there or is notable in it's absence. However, as with many of the things that describe themselves in this way, that is not the case.

In this particular case, HTTP clients for the OSX ecosystem are not missing, they're just not that great.

In general I just dislike the wording.

I think it just means missing as in something you always wished you had.

I bought Paw after exercising the free trial and have been very happy with it. My favorite thing thus far was a feature request I sent to the developer actually got implemented in one subsequent release. I paid prior to that, and don't regret it. Saving requests is nice, but being able to generate useful ObjC based around several different networking stacks is amazing. The price is steep, but it's clear a lot of worm has gone in to the app, and the dev deserves to be compensated for it.

I discovered this about 2 weeks ago and it is hands-down the best API tester I've found. I've also used Echo and RESTed on Mac which were great, but this blows them out of the water. Even Postman, which I find to be a pain in the browser (and especially the newer versions, which require a separate browser window). Well worth the $20.

I like the idea of the app, however I can't seem to figure out how do send in a nested JSON object in my request body such as {user:{email:"b@s.c", password:"password", password_confirmation:"password"}}. It seems to only allow flat request bodies?

Although it looks pretty, the $20 price tag is going to keep me away.

I'm using Postman and REST Easy in my browser for current HTTP/REST API testing, although I would love a real cross-platform desktop client.

I've been using it for a couple months now. If your job involves any meaningful amount of HTTP-related work, it's worth a lot more than $20. If $20 is too much, you're badly underpaid. Even colleagues of mine in Taiwan, who make a fraction what US-based developers do, bought it as soon as they tried it.

You can use the JetBrains tools which have a plugin for HTTP/Rest api testing. Should work with their free java edition. http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/rest-client-tool-windo...

A $2 application that I found before I knew about this one is GraphicalHTTPClient (available in the app store). Not as feature rich, but I've really found it handy

It may be $20, but it's a fair bit more robust (and, subjectively, better designed).

Some additional features include code generation (handy for this crufty-type code... especially in Objective-C) and dynamic values (you can pull values out of prior requests to craft more dynamic requests).

+1 for Postman in Chrome. Keeps an excellent history and allows for grouping requests against different "environments" among other nice-ities.

Same here, I'm using Advanced REST client and very happy with it. Plus it is indeed advanced and have many features with Paw in common. (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/advanced-rest-clie...)

+1 to Advanced REST. I use to use that, but these days I use postman https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/postman-rest-clien...

+1 for Advanced Rest Client. Even saves my request groups to google drive

Since Postman runs as a separate app outside the browser window, it's essentially a cross-platform desktop app.

Given the rise of Xamarin, support for C# would be great as well (the recently updated PaintCode has supported Xamarin/C# code generation since its first release I think).

I use it, and love it. It just works, and great support

How does it compare to Postman?

Especially now when they've introduced Jetpacks. A comparison would be great.

on the page, I can't see anything in the "code generation" section

Takes a moment to load...

No Oauth2 support :(

Yeah, but with Dynamic Values, you can totally overcome that problem.

Any favorite iPad apps for the same thing?

This one is a real time saver.

The page crashes Tint Browser on Android 4.3 (edit: and is blank on another, proprietary browser)

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