Executive Overview / HOW I USE IT:
Postman helps me be more efficient while working with APIs. Using Postman, I can construct complex HTTP requests quickly, organize them in collections and share them with my co-workers and clients. Postman provides a very clean user interface (UI) and is quite handy being in the browser for manually invoking REST and SOAP API calls for the developer, tester or enthusiast. Postman allows you to save your calls in collections using environments (variable collections) as well as import and export them. This makes it easy to build libraries of calls easily and simple to share.
Where to get it?
Google Play Market Place at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/postman-rest-client/fdmmgilgnpjigdojojpjoooidkmcomcm
How Much does it cost?
Donation Supported
What is the licensing model?
Apache License, Version 2.0, January 2004, https://www.apache.org/licenses/
What are the requirements?
Google Chrome Web Browser (Apple Mac, Windows and Linux)
Is it Open Source?
Yes, hosted on Github at https://github.com/a85/POSTMan-Chrome-Extension
What kind of Support exists?
GitHub for bugs and enhancements, fix or create them yourself and a twitter
How do I use it in my day to day work?
To manually mock/code up and/or test REST or SOAP API calls
Why this over other tools?
I like the visual work space and the non-IDE/Code format. It provides a seemingly natural and simpler UI than that of SoapUI but not as spartan as curl
Key Features
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Compact layout
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HTTP requests with file upload support
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Formatted API responses for JSON and XML
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HATEOS support
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Image previews
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Request history
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Basic Auth and OAuth 1.0 helpers
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Autocomplete for URL and header values
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Key/value editors for adding parameters or header values. Works for URL parameters too.
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Use environment variables to easily shift between settings. Great for testing production, staging or local setups.
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Keyboard shortcuts to maximize your productivity
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Use collections to organize requests.
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Document requests inside collections. You can even store entire HTML notes. Postman uses Bootstrap so you can use it too to style your notes.
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Download and share collections with your team of developers.
Features that impressed me
- Clean user interface
- History
- Collections
- Export of Collections
- Environments (variables)
What Features I would I like to see added?
- sync integration like Chrome Bookmarks that is sharable via Google Drive, but the current share is nice (just want portability between machines)
- oAuth 2.0 support like the 1.0 tab
- example collections for Twitter, Google, Facebook, DocuSign, etc as part of the product install, vs going to get them via the shared versions
Example of Tool Usage
- DocuSign Login
Postman Collection DocuSign
- Twitter feed get
Postman Collection Twitter
Key Screenshots
- Request
Postman Request
- Response
Postman Response – Twitter stream
- History
Postman History DocuSign
- Collections
Postman Collections DocuSign, Salesforce & Twitter
How did I learn about Postman?
A colleague of mine at DocuSign, Gil Vincent suggested this tool to the ProServ team for creating examples for clients using the DocuSign REST API as SoapUI (also recommended by Gil Vincent) had some limitations on the size of multi-part form body length in a REST request.
Call to Action
So go try it out and see what Postman REST client can do for your tool set!
Extra Credit
Tell me how Postman has helped you in the comments below