Jul 29, 2016 - Paw is an advanced developer tool with serious functionality for testing APIs, and many of the most upvoted comments are basically just. Proxy.rest Paw – The most advanced API tool for Mac Paw is a full-featured and beautifully designed Mac app that makes interaction with REST services delightful.Whether you are an API maker or consumer, Paw helps.
I can't believe some of the comments in this thread. Paw is an advanced developer tool with serious functionality for testing APIs, and many of the most upvoted comments are basically just posting links to similar tools, with substantially less functionality, that are free. How many of these commenters make thousands of dollars every month as professional software engineers? How many make thousands each week? Paw is an extremely high quality, native Mac app, made by a small team trying to provide for their families by building software for other software engineers like all of us. It's a paid tool but it's probably the most sophisticated API testing tool that exists.
Aug 7, 2016 - Paw is a native Mac HTTP client for testing REST APIs and features code generators, advanced support for cookies and sessions, and more.
I've been a completely satisfied Paw user for over a year. It's been invaluable to me and I use it constantly. It is worth the money. It is more sophisticated with a far better user interface than anything else out there. Use the trial, buy it if you like it, but this pattern of comments saying Check Out Product Z, It's Like Product Y But Free (And Less Good) makes me hate coming to HN. Fair point, but I also think that a fair number of HN readers who are the target audience for Paw are not necessarily high paid engineers and are likely home hobbyists or students etc.
Who are building stuff on the side on a ramen budget. As someone who is trying to bootstrap a SaaS app myself that is currently costing me a around $1000/mth, spending yet another $60 (converted to AU$) is something to think long and hard about, especially seeing as I have been using Postman for several versions with good results. If someone can point out a compelling reason that Paw Postman v2 because of x,y and z then I am happy to consider that and perhaps splurge for a licence.
I don't think $70 is expensive for good software BTW, but I just haven't been sold on the value of it so far. I agree, before I buy software or start using something I will search on HN for threads like this to see what criticisms others have and what alternatives other people use. Many times I will find something with the same features but cheaper or open source. If people stopped making comments recommending alternatives, similar things, and criticisms I probably wouldn't even look at the comments. I don't know if other people use HN like this, but it's the main reason the comments on here are valuable for me.
As the founder of Paw, I'm certainly biased, so I'll stick to the facts. Paw has 'dynamic values' which lets you inline computed components in any field of your request: useful for pointing to values from other requests, previous responses (parsing is done on the fly, no need to refresh), which is useful if you want to send back an auth token returned by a previous request. Dynamic values can do also stuff like MD5/SHA hashes, HMAC, URL/hex/base64 encode, timestamps, randomizers (Chance.js, JSON schema faker) with no code required (you can write custom JS snippets too if ever needed). For example, we once demo'ed the Algolia guys that their custom HMAC-based signature for client-side search was doable with no code.
Paw The Most Advanced Api Tool For Mac
So, if you have the need, you can do custom stuff easily. Also, extensions (many are built by users) are bringing lots of extra features we would have not thought about ourselves: Environment variables in Paw can be nested or computed (with 'dynamic values' described above). It can be useful, for example, to have an 'Auth' variable that contains a pointer that accesses the 'user.accesstoken' JSON path from inside the latest Login request, so you can later simply point to the 'Auth' variable everywhere else. One other thing about envs, is that you can have independent groups of environments: a typical example is you have a 'Server' group with envs called 'Prod', 'Staging', 'Local' and independently a setup with user credentials or variables that are more like static globals (AWS Keys, etc.) Now regarding to the team syncing service, 'Paw for Teams'. It has branches, snapshots and full history.
In a dev team, it means one dev can experiment stuff on the schema for API v2 while others are fixing bugs on API v1, and when API v2 is ready they can seamlessly merge the new updates back to the v1 branch. Also, we've made the choice not to be real-time synced, because it doesn't fit well to software development: when I'm experimenting stuff with an API I don't want others to be polluted by my temporary garbage. So instead you 'commit' changes only when ready. More about Teams here: Last but not least, Paw locally encrypts with a randomly generated symmetric passphrase all credentials you enter in your projects, that means your server keys, access tokens, etc. Are a lot safer.
And now that you can (optionally) sync with Paw's backend, we certainly don't want to have your secrets in cleartext on our infra. As passphrases are never uploaded (obviously! But by default stored in OS X Keychain), it's the users responsibility to safeguard them and share them with their team (on 1Password or similar).
As a Paw user, I can say that I have found it extremely useful, and well worth the cost. However, it has been a disappointment to me that (at least the last time I asked), 'dynamic values' are actually 'dynamic string values' with no integer dynamic values supported. I find dynamic value really useful, but in most of my use, it's dynamic integer values that I need, and so the feature is much less useful than it could be. Could you please comment on when you plan on implementing dynamic integer values into Paw?
Also, it appears that you have changed which versions of OS X you support, but I had to overwrite my old version of Paw with the new one to find this out. I strongly suggest making it clear which version of OS X the new version of Paw requires before someone installs it.
Thanks for the feedback, John! As you're referring to dynamic values as integer values in JSON requests, it's clearly something we will fix. It was planned for Paw 3, but we had to drop features to keep a reasonable timeline. What we will be adding at the same time, is the ability to have dynamic values that return 'objects' (or lists) so in a JSON, so you can dump a subtree. About the OS X support, we haven't changed the requirements at all for this release. Paw is OS X 10.10+ (Yosemite+) since Paw 2.3.
So maybe you had an earlier version? If you were prompted to update with no warning, that's a bug.
Sorry about it! Will investigate. Paw is an extremely high quality, native Mac app, made by a small team trying to provide for their families by building software for other software engineers like all of us. It's a paid tool but it's probably the most sophisticated API testing tool that exists. Thing is, most of us don't care. I don't care if Paw engineers aren't selling their software.
Just like they shouldn't care if I'm not selling mine. People are not going to stop using software that does 80% of what Paw does (but probably 100% of their needs) because it hurts their feelings. If Product Z is less good than Paw but still fills my needs and is free, Product Z is going to be my choice. Bonus points if it's FOSS. There's also the fact that not all of us work on Mac.
I'd love to try out Paw, but unless I see a.deb somewhere, I'm out of luck. So my solution is to grab alternatives.
Check Out Product Z, It's Like Product Y But Free (And Less Good) makes me hate coming to HN. At the other extreme, we have software monoculture.
Variety of software is good. Making FOSS software known is good. I'm actually going to go a step further and say that if FOSS software copies pixel for pixel Paw's UI and UX, that is a good thing. When someone decides to write some very useful software to sell it and someone else 'copies pixel per pixel' the software is simply stealing the original author work. If you want to write your software and release it with an open source license you are perfectly able to do it.
If you are simply doing an exact copy 'pixel per pixel' of someone else work and releasing it as an open source you are stealing his intellectual property given that the original license is NOT open source. I really love open source, but people that think in this way seriously risk to undermine my trust on the whole OSS model. I actually like this pattern.
I mean, as a (not so highly paid) developer who also does a lot of personal/hobby programming, I'm evaluating and using a ton of tools every year. If I were to ignore the free alternatives, I would be utterly broke now. Sure, if something is a product I'll be using day-in, day-out for the foreseeable future, I'll happily shell out $quite-a-lot. But if I expect to use it for half a day every three months or so, I'll look for something free.
Paw The Most Advanced Api Tool For Mac Pro
I do some amount of vector drawing for random reasons (designing t-shirts for myself, logos for my projects, user interfaces, whatever) - enough to figure out Inkscape, not enough to justify buying Illustrator.