Postwoman – a free alternative to Postman

Some of Insomnia's biggest differentiators are it's GraphQL query editor (autocomplete, linting, etc) and it's ability to be customized via plugins and themes.

chalst• 7 years ago

From https://dev.to/liyasthomas/i-created-postwoman-an-online-ope... the author stripped down Chromium for the UI in order to get something much lighter than an Electron app.

reificator3• 7 years ago

the author stripped down Chromium for the UI in order to get something much lighter than an Electron app.

If an organization did this, I'd be all for it. An individual? I'd bet this is going to slow down updates to Chromium significantly, and eventually lead to either security issues or maintenance fatigue resulting in closure of the project.

I'm not saying it's 100% going to happen like that, but that's on the wrong side of my risk tolerance line for adding a tool to my everyday suite.

house9-2• 7 years ago

Insomnia is great!

cmdshiftf4• 7 years ago

Ever since Postman started getting worse I switched to Insomnia and haven't looked back.

Curious to know what you feel as been getting worse with Postman?

I'm a long time user of it myself and feel it has consistently done what it says it will do without much cruft.

zip1234• 7 years ago

Really like the simplicity of the testing integrated with it

jawns2• 7 years ago

I'm curious about whether the product name "Postwoman" violates Postman's trademark and whether Postwoman will be getting a C&D letter soon, demanding that the name be changed.

Normally companies don't get to claim broad trademark protection for prefixes -- Facebook has been shut down when trying to broadly enforce its trademark against anything prefixed with "Face" -- but "Postwoman" is close enough and is marketed as a competing product in the same place.

Update: It seems the author is also worried about this. On her blog post announcing the service, someone raised the concern, and she acknowledged that it's a problem: https://dev.to/liyasthomas/comment/ee8m

epx• 7 years ago

But it is cool.

redisman• 7 years ago

Their branding is cool but not really reliant on the name. The whole alien thing is pretty fun and simple

ebg132• 7 years ago

What if the name were changed to Pos2man? ^_^

liyasthomas12• 7 years ago

Author here: I think this is funny because few reads it: posTWOman :/

rhacker• 7 years ago

It's like one of those marketing things - at some point or another Postman will need to decide what to do here. If they go after them, postwoman will get tons of "free" publicity and probably get the PR win, even if it means renaming to "Post Woman" (with a space) or declaring they will fight it in court.

If Postman decides NOT to pursue it, some users may simply be turned off to the fact that they decided to invade the space of Postman with a similar name. I and probably others would probably have respected a different name altogether.

If Uber got a competitor called Ubor people would probably also be annoyed.

jawns2• 7 years ago

If Postman decides NOT to pursue it

Choosing not to pursue it can put the trademark at risk.

So even if Postman would otherwise shrug, it may need to pursue it to protect its right to the mark.

djsumdog• 7 years ago

Huh .. Postman is MPL-2.0 is seems, but it is also a commercial operation (and even non-commercial organizations often hold and protect trademarks like Mozilla). It's not a joke or broken project, so it wouldn't be protected under parody. I too am curious if Postman will go after this project to defend their trademark.

rohan1024• 7 years ago

https://www.openbook.social got into trouble for this exactly.

bacondude3• 7 years ago

Not well educated in trademark law, but given how The South Butt, LLC fared, I'd guess Postman could win if they decided to sue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_South_Butt

perspective1• 7 years ago

IANAL but the basic sniff test is could "Postwoman" be confused with "Postman?" I think the answer is yes. With the author calling it an alternative to "Postman," you have the author acknowledging Postman is a strong trademark. And it's not like it's the only one available fitting the "{HTTP-METHOD}{MAN|WOMAN}" construct-- you could rename it "HeadWoman" and probably be okay.

jedieaston• 7 years ago

And I don’t think GETwoman or PUTWoman would be good either, as there’s other apps for that.

Mountain_Skies• 7 years ago

If she named it Going Postal, how old would one need to be to get the reference?

DoofusOfDeath• 7 years ago

I could imagine the optics of going after a project named "Postwoman" would lead Postman to not pursue this.

adventured• 7 years ago

Zero chance of that being a primary issue when you're dealing with a directly competing product.

If they allow their trademark to go unprotected from an extremely blatant hit like this, their trademark might as well be worthless. Having a competing product in the market using an intentionally similar name, is a large value debasement for the Postman brand & offering (not to mention the $58m in venture capital that is betting on the value of those things).

Is Postwoman from the Postman company? They're similar products? Are they competing products from the same company? The sound you hear is millions of dollars in venture capital being flushed down the toilet.

No serious company is going to hold back on a legal response just because you staple woman/women/her/she to their existing trademarks and seek to compete head-on with their products or services.

xmprt• 7 years ago

Trademark laws are about consumer protection which is why companies must enforce their trademark or they risk losing it. In this case, I initially thought Postwoman was a spinoff of Postman built by the same team (not sure why they would do this but I guess representation is all the rage nowadays). If a consumer could mistake the product as a different one then it's grounds for trademark violation.

Disclamer: I am not a lawyer but I have at least a high level understanding of trademark law.

waterdownship• 7 years ago

Trademarks are protected to prevent fraud and impersonation of other companies. So we don't want to accidentally mistake a e.g. gougle product as a google one. That was the very legal intention of trademark laws.

In the case of postwoman, it's kind of hard to imagine anyone would mistake it for postman. So it's unlikely postman would win a lawsuit against it.

liyasthomas12• 7 years ago

There's lot of projects like: Next, Nest, Nuxt.. I wonder how this would apply to them.

Insanity• 7 years ago

Postman is so horrendously slow when using a quite large "team space". I should really explore the alternatives

thrownaway954• 7 years ago

How does this compare to insomnia.

https://github.com/getinsomnia/insomnia

muhammadusman• 7 years ago

so happy that you mentioned this, my first time hearing of this. this is why I love HN, someone always has a suggestion/alternative!

Going to use this instead of Postman now!

PhilippGille• 7 years ago

Just a side note: Insomnia was recently acquired by Kong (the API gateway): https://konghq.com/blog/kong-acquires-insomnia/

gschier2• 7 years ago

It looks like Postwoman is is more of a simple utility right now. Perhaps it will grow to something more full-featured in the future but that seems to be the main differentiator right now. Insomnia, for example, supports environment variables, a GraphQL IDE, plugins, and many different authentication formats.

As the creator of Insomnia, I love seeing new projects like this and am really excited to see what Postwoman grows into. It looks awesome, is open source, and there's always room for more developer tools! :)

mfontani• 7 years ago

Posthuman was taken?

frabbit• 7 years ago

Author should take advantage of this suggestion. It's awesome and side-steps the noise around the current name.

faissaloo2• 7 years ago

I'm all for anything killing Electron

bob11222• 7 years ago

Same, however this similarly is also a Chromium / JS mishmash

faissaloo2• 7 years ago

Small steps

liyasthomas12• 7 years ago

Author here: https://dev.to/liyasthomas/postwoman-v1-0-a-free-fast-beauti...

ukyrgf• 7 years ago

Does anybody else take a project a _lot_ less seriously when all of their documentation and commit messages are plastered with emojis? I feel like I can't create a cohesive narrative in my mind when every sentence ends with a unicorn or a rainbow or a volcano.

bob11222• 7 years ago

Absolutely, maybe I'm not with the trends but it seems unprofessional and doesn't add much value (for myself)

blackearl• 7 years ago

I see it a lot on here as well, even in very source heavy or scientific posts. It rubs me the wrong way when a post ends with ;)

luketheobscure• 7 years ago

When emoji use follows a strict convention (something like https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/), it can make it easier to scan a list of commits and get a rough idea of where the development focus is (i.e., hardening vs. feature development).

aylmao2• 7 years ago

I've seen this convention before. I personally find it more useful to tag commit messages with [fix], [docs], etc. It makes it more easily searchable, which is IMO what you really want. You can:

    git log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit | grep "\[doc"

to see documentation commits, and count them by piping to `wc`.

Emojis feel... complicated. What do they mean? Here you're just typing the literal word so not much to remember or search.

gatherhunterer4• 7 years ago

That is far too much vocabulary to use effectively. A single-word designation would be much easier to discern and easier to translate. A word can be translated in a way that is meaningful but the “obvious” associations of the emojis may not make any sense in the context of a different language. Replacing language with inscrutable symbolism is bad design.

ijustwanttovote• 7 years ago

Easier to glance at an emoji than a commit message. Thanks for this guide.

Ayesh2• 7 years ago

I really would like to see how Linus would react to a PR with commit messages like this.

eeZah7Ux• 7 years ago

A simple text string would be much faster to search in a browser or command line.

Most browsers would highlight all the matches.

On top of that, emojis are much less friendly to visually impaired people.

steve_adams_86• 7 years ago

I've been using the same branching strategy for about 5 years, and it has worked really well. I suspect it's fairly common, although everywhere I've worked we've switched to this from something with less structure. Essentially the branch naming pattern looks like:

    [ticket-type]/#TICKET-[ticket-description]

In practice it might look like:

    bug/APP-123-prevent-auth-redirect-loop

It makes it so you can easily automate ticket statuses with commits and merges, grep for types of issues without needing to type/remember an emoji, and you don't need to worry about emojis rendering differently on different platforms. The text will always be the same.

The emoji thing is fine if it's for fun - we should all enjoy ourselves and our work a little more - but I'm hard pressed to see the practicality of it.

Etheryte• 7 years ago

The whole issue is further amplified by the fact that the imagery isn't even remotely related to the actual content. Even the current latest commits list on the repo homepage has commits ":rotating_light: Lint" and ":zap: Lint".

mcny• 7 years ago

Does changing : rotating_light: to :rotating_light: (removing a space) require rewriting history in git? does it mean people who have cloned the repo will need to (yuck) force pull?

liyasthomas12• 7 years ago

Author here: That was prolly a mistake made by me. Sorry.

tehwebguy• 7 years ago

Personally they've has helped with the automated messages my team's software pushes into project management system because they visually represent what type of message was pushed.

Seems like it's doing the same thing here, I kind of hope to see more of it!

dcwca• 7 years ago

No, emojis are incredibly expressive and enrich all forms of writing. I'm excited to see this style of communication penetrate more spaces :slightly-smiling-face:.

Edit: The emoji I added to the above message was stripped by HN's submission system.

EpicEng3• 7 years ago

Edit: The emoji I added to the above message was stripped by HN's submission system.

One more reason to love HN

F-0X• 7 years ago

No, emojis are incredibly expressive and enrich all forms of writing.

I certainly find many (almost all?) highly ambiguous, which is the total opposite of expressive in my opinion.

I'm aware I will sound "old man shouts at cloud" to some, but if you need emojis to express yourself, you are lacking language skills.

aylmao2• 7 years ago

+1.

I personally think that first part of the readme made good use of them and kinda helped me navigate the different sections, but they're very distracting in the commit messages, H1s and the description.

Not every line needs an emoji at the beginning or end, and IMO rarely does it need both.

Emojis in text IMO are like jokes in movies. The funnest movies have them, they're placed well and they're effective. Other movies have so many of them they just pull you from the story and then you just can't relate.

bort-simpson2• 7 years ago

Personally doesn't bother me. It definitely gives a more playful theme which I think is a good thing instead of trying to read a wall of just text documentation.

zorbash• 7 years ago

I'd argue that the tone is what matters most and not the presence of emojis. For example, this is an example of a particularly bad changelog which isn't sprinkled with emojis. https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/v2.5.0/deps/npm/CHANGELO...

Imagine trying to handle a production incident, going through such a changelog, reading "HAHA WHOOPS LIL SHINKWRAP ISSUE THERE LOL".

beefhash• 7 years ago

Though not a library, Discord also seems to love using this style for their changelogs.

I'm not a fan.

Ayesh2• 7 years ago

I know I don't. It's one thing to sprinkle some fun here and there, but I have seen many projects (JS mostly) with so many unicorn emojis everywhere, and a huge logo in it's GitHub readme. It's not that the library name is self explanatory either.Mocha, Jasmine, Karma.. do they _really_ sound like testing frameworks?

ben_jones2• 7 years ago

The problem with emojis is that they render inconsistently in different mediums and there are better ways to communicate the same intent, especially to users less familiar with emoji usage. For a project like this I think its alright, it adds spunk to a already spunky project (I define spunky as gung-ho competing with a funded and mature project because you think you can do a better job - which I support). I disagree with their usage in the h1 tags and a few other places because I think it looks bad, but its not my project and not a massive deal regardless.

All said I don't like the name because it puts Postman in a tough situation, keep the gender pronoun if you want just don't make it near identical to them.

bayindirh2• 7 years ago

I personally dislike prettifying of text interfaces with forced conventions/icons/*mojis. Text interface is well, should be text. There are well defined conventions and tools built around these conventions.

Tag with [tag], use consistent spacing etc. and, make it easy on the eyes.

Same with glorified .bashrc files used to create graphic-git command prompts.

krapp• 7 years ago

There is no difference between a glyph that displays a letter and a glyph that displays an image, it's an arbitrary matter of the encoding between code points and a font. And as emoji are already part of Unicode, they're just as much "text" as ASCII.

dvasdekis• 7 years ago

Perhaps it makes initially using the project seem more fun and approachable from a first glance? I am a hardened bitter old fart, but I like them. :)

liyasthomas12• 7 years ago

Author here: I love emojis because they are fun and makes it enjoyable. I don't look for the technicality behind it.

zzo38computer• 7 years ago

I don't like having a lot of emoji in it either, but if the words are still readable then it can still be readable and seriously enough.

danudey2• 7 years ago

Can you define "Plastered"? From what I can see, of the most recent 35 commits, there exist seven emoji, plus one that would have been but was a typo. Also, none of them are unicorns or rainbows or volcanoes.

I'm wondering if you're referring to a different project that you've seen and were just reminded of it, or if you're exaggerating because you saw something you didn't like.

Also, using visual indicators is nothing new; Jenkins uses thunderstorms and suns to denote build status, and marketing pages are often full of images, icons, and iconography.

The reality is, the younger generation communicates differently than the older generation, and different subcultures communicate differently from each other. Maybe you take someone less seriously because of the way they communicate, but that's on you, not on them.

liyasthomas12• 7 years ago

Author here: Sorry if my usage of emojis made you uncomfortable. I don't think using emojis would soften the seriousness of a project There's lot of projects that uses Gitmoji and it's all v.appreciated too. Don't make someone feel lesser when you don't like it. I like to keep a signature on everything I do, whether its commit messages or anything else.

tinus_hn• 7 years ago

Don’t mind the fun police. Everything does not have to be grayscale only, especially not a volunteer project.

algaeontoast• 7 years ago

Yeah, it’s juvenile and cheeky. Not what I’m looking for when I just want to find what I need efficiently when I look through docs...

kanox• 7 years ago

So I guess commit messages support emojis now.

I've seen this before, but not quite so consistently.

Koshkin• 7 years ago

Why does the word ‘woman’ look like a derivative of the word ‘man’? I think it’s unfair! (The term ‘female’ is no big help, either.)

abdisalan• 7 years ago

Or you could see it as man + (something) -- i.e. better than man. It really depends on how you take a normal word and assign an agenda to it.

shantly• 7 years ago

Ditto "man" and "he" being used when the sex of the person in question isn't known, or as a poetic stand-in for "human"—the usual complaint about that is that it implies maleness is "normal" at the expense of women but it could just as easily be seen as erasing what's distinctive about maleness, at its expense and in favor of women, who get their own dedicated words that aren't multi-purposed and also used to refer to men in some cases. Just a matter of perspective who's harmed by it (if you take anyone as being harmed).

Someone• 7 years ago

One can also see a male as 2/3 of a female or as a Fe-male with an iron deficit.

mitchty• 7 years ago

Because it isn't a derivative of it.

Have a listen to this podcast by a linguist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607712

The short answer is the modern word woman has a separate etymological root than the word man. And the word man has had linguistic changes recently that mask those origins. Woman as well actually.

Man originally meant human really, and woman used to be Wifman (somewhat literally female human). Wife is a holdover from this prior to Middle english usage of the term.

Old english used wer and wif as man/woman respectively, and as you can guess Werewolf derives from the old ussage of man.

In short, its complicated and woman isn't a derivative of man. Its much more interesting than that. You can't look at the modern spelling of words to derive much on how we got to this point. You'll make a ton of categorical errors that way, especially in English given man used to just be the human race. Our modern take of man anywhere as needing to be replaced with woman depending on gender is slightly amusing once you know the etymology of the term in that regard.

dgellow• 7 years ago

Unfortunately your link doesn't seem to be correct.

ummonk• 7 years ago

Incidentally, the "-man" in "postman is pronounced like the -"man" in "woman", not like "man".

jamie_ca• 7 years ago

The big rant I keep seeing around the internet is https://i.imgur.com/6g45AxX.png

liyasthomas12• 7 years ago

Author here: Wow i never knew this. Thanks for sharing this.

m3kw9• 7 years ago

What’s the difference between this name and postman2?

detaro2• 7 years ago

Original Show HN by the creator 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20817627

liyasthomas12• 7 years ago

Author here: yep, that was me.

bort-simpson2• 7 years ago

I don't see a feature where you can create tests for responses which is a very important feature for me that exists in Postman

calibas• 7 years ago

Maybe I'm missing it, but I'm not seeing the full response headers, just "cache-control" and "content-type". Being able to see the full response headers would make this a much more useful tool for debugging APIs.

liyasthomas12• 7 years ago

Would you like to report the issue faced on GitHub so that we could track and rectify them really quick.

lilyball• 7 years ago

I'm encouraged by the GraphQL support with docs, except there appears to be no way to provide headers (such as Authorization), which means I can't even fetch my schema.

liyasthomas12• 7 years ago

Author here: GraphQL support is just landed on PW. Expect all functionalities in a month. Follow the project on GitHub.

telekid• 7 years ago

If Postwoman doesn't tickle your fancy, I'd take a look at https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el. (I believe there's a vim equivalent, too.) You can save requests in a simple .http file, and check them into your codebase. Makes collaboration very simple.

paedubucher2• 7 years ago

I always wonder why some many developers work with Postman (or Postwoman), and so without any automation whatsoever. Example: Requesting some JSON payload and extracting some generated id from it looks like a clumsy point-and-click adventure. With curl, you can use any appropriate program to extract output, say jq:

    curl acme.org/my/resource | jq -r '.id'

I see how some project manager doing a presentation of a bleeding-edge feature might profit from Postman, but as a developer?

yahyaheee• 7 years ago

Yea devs that use postman crack me up, in my experience you usually just aren’t writing tests

paedubucher2• 7 years ago

Exploring an API?

ta34646856fh• 7 years ago

For one, the GUI allows you to store your various HTTP actions and replay them, and while you can get that in your shell it takes a bit more work to set it up/present it/reuse it.

I've used it often for ad-hoc requests, where there's authentication/OAuth tokens required, JSON payloads that would be a pain to put into the shell.

Obviously it doesn't negate the need for testing or replace tests, but not every ad-hoc investigation needs to be wrapped in a test.

johnny22• 7 years ago

I guess I don't do enough interesting queries to need a dedicated GUI client. I usually rely on httpie over plain curl or postman. I'd never even heard of insomnia.

oliyoung• 7 years ago

I'm re-writing an API and Insomnia is a required tool because ...

* Non trivial authorisation

* Chained commands

* Templated requests

* Random generation of content

kamfc• 7 years ago

"Politically Correct" penetrates software -- Support at your own peril -- you may be the next victim.

K2L8M11N2• 7 years ago

How does one eyeroll in text? Asking for a friend...

thecleaner• 7 years ago

It should cost 80percent of postman technically.

forgot-my-pw• 7 years ago

What should a free version be? PostSlave?

liyasthomas12• 7 years ago

Author here: Ask me anything! Shoot me any doubts, asks and I'll rectify them.

nickjj• 7 years ago

Nice timing.

If anyone is interested in how Postwoman was developed and deployed, the author of the project did a huge write up of her tech stack today.

That's at: https://runninginproduction.com/interviews/5-postwoman-is-a-...

liyasthomas12• 7 years ago

Yes!! Author here. Please go through this.

codesternews• 7 years ago

The author is Male. I am not sure just to get attention he brings gender issue in non gender name.

Also it should be good idea to get some other name. The product itself is good.

I am sad to see you get lot of attention because of gender instead of your actual work.

Postwoman – a free alternative to Postman

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