9 ms·

Postman Flows: the next generation of software development

45 points by vishnumenon 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jawns 4y ago
I love the idea of this. Reminds me of Yahoo Pipes, which was years ahead of its time. But I'm not so sure they're going to get the adoption they're after. Even the developers I know who are enthusiastic about Postman for its core offering haven't really responded to Postman's push to move more of the development cycle into the application, and I can't imagine this will be the thing to pull them in.
- darkteflon 4y ago
  Yeah I don’t really understand why my API testing framework is the right place for any of this. Edit: Unless my API framework wants to own all my shit.
  - detaro 4y ago
    > wants to own all my shit. They need to justify having taken hundreds of millions in funding somehow...
theogravity 4y ago
How is this the next generation if Yahoo Pipes did it over 16 years ago (wiki says launched in 2007)? It's nice to see a modern version of it, though.
preommr 4y ago
I have high hopes for this. Postman somehow managed to make a slow, bloated, piece-of-crap api-tester that's somehow wildly popular. Extrapolating from that, I expect this to be incredibly successful regardless of how good it is.
- somehnguy 4y ago
  I use Postman every single day and have very similar feelings towards it as you. Simple things that would make it exponentially more friendly to use just aren’t there, and I can’t believe they haven’t been added in the years it has existed. It updates itself occasionally but never gets any better! All that said - know of any better alternatives?
  - capableweb 4y ago
    I used to be a fan of Postman (in the early beginnings of the tool), but as it added features I didn't use and became slower and slower, I got tired of it. Eventually, I figured I should try something true and tested, so I went for cURL. It takes a bit of practice and memory to learn how to do even the basics, but once it's there, it's a rock solid tool, with support for almost everything you could think of.
    - rhaway84773 4y ago
      I used to use Postman exclusively, but like you started trying curl. And then I realized curl was absolutely brilliant for my common uses because I’d write simple scripts that would mean all I needed to pass in were the arguments that changed. I took it another step further and had my script lookup a folder that had a whole bunch of different types of requests that I could then trigger with a single command. Finally, I created a version that plugged into fzf and made it super easy for me to run a whole bunch of common scripts trivially from the command line. The great thing about command line based programs is the incredible ease with which you can create repeatable series of commands that can be run both interactively or programmatically, and the UX can be tailored to suit the specific needs of what you’re trying to do.
    - dzhiurgis 4y ago
      I always get red flags when you send someone curl example and they ask for postman
  - XorNot 4y ago
    jupyterlab, Python and requests. That ecosystem will do everything Postman can do, has broad support, and a much closer relationship to your actual code.
throwway120385 4y ago
I don't know why but I'm always tickled when someone comes up with yet another data-oriented / flow diagram programming language like NI LabView. And my first thought is always "this will break down exactly like LabView and for the same reasons." Someone will inevitably come up with a use case that is just a little too complicated but without any mechanism to go from data flow to program code there are going to be some really painful migrations.
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  There wasn’t a single day i used labview that I did not wish it was a simpler CLI or text file based program. Heck, even an imperative text based programming language would have been fine. And Labview was one of the best Visual programming tools I’ve used and possibly in existence.
prng2021 4y ago
The 101st, no 1001st, iteration of a no-code platform. Soon to support low-code as well I’m sure.
- sytringy05 4y ago
  lol, here's my visual flow which consists of "start" -> "script node" -> "end" Still, people buy Dell Boomi and Mulesoft, so it's not like there's no market for this rubbish
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
I would love to see a new term to replace "software development" that describes the sorts of task that Postman (Flows) are appropriate for. "Application development" is a bit of a throwback, but it's a good start. This stuff has nothing to do with the majority of software development if measured by task type, even if it has everything to do with the majority of "software development" if narrowed down to browser/web-centric data presentation and editing domains. This has nothing to offer embedded systems, creative software, operating systems, high performance computing, LLMs and so much more.
lowken 4y ago
Postman is the most amazing software development tool I have used in my 20+ year career.
bigmattystyles 4y ago
Isn't this just Jupyter Notebook with a nicer interface?
throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
APIs aren't a step forward, they're a step back. They're a terrible abstraction. Their interfaces are versioned and often not backwards compatible, data exchange is often poorly documented using no common conventions, the underlying HTTP interfaces vary greatly, there's no universal way to read the docs, and there is no single standard or convention for them. Compare to Unix. Single way to run something, one simple return status, one basic input stream, two basic output streams, standard key=value pairs that can be inherited and passed on, generic arguments, there's usually a man page that fully explains how to use it, and they can be infinitely chained. APIs require way too much "integration" and provide too little utility, and zero composeability. They're extra work with less usefulness. But, hey, "it's the web", and we're all too chickenshit to buck any trend that starts. We're slaves to whatever shitty paradigm takes over on "the web". The web killed computer science innovation. We're just slowly and poorly rebuilding an operating system on top of a browser. But with more complexity and less utility.
- clocker 4y ago
  Well, you wouldn’t be able to type this rant here without the web!
benatkin 4y ago
> Postman Flows is a generation leap in software development. I think not. It seems like Yahoo! Pipes. It's cool but I don't see most devs using it. And FWIW Scratch is way cooler. It could still be nice but that's exaggerating it a whole lot, I think. Pipedream could be much further along. https://pipedream.com/ https://pipedream.com/
- ramraj07 4y ago
  This seems a hard thing for many if not most devs but even in the most hardcore software company most employees are not devs. If anything the smartest people in your org are not the devs (unless you’re FAAnG). Any tool that puts more power into the non devs is a great tool. Any person managing a company that needs to string apis together and perform high touch service would need a tool like this. Now why this tool and not any other RPA is a different question.
  - benatkin 4y ago
    Look at the examples though. See the second one. In the animation, it shows the dot distributing the different values within a response, as though it's some parallel task. Outside of that it's serializing an array on time for no reason I can tell. That's like the Jump to Conclusions Mat in Office Space...
stonogo 4y ago
The next generation of software development won't cost $20/mo to use.
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  Is there anywhere in the world where an even a 1% improvement in efficiency wouldn’t pay for itself? That’s a $24k/yr salary. If you used 10 $20/mo software tools, that would cost you $2400/yr. That hardly seems unreasonable.
  - stonogo 4y ago
    Sure, it seems super reasonable. That's why you pay for things like Python, GCC, Go, etc. It's also why Chrome dominates the browser market -- they can innovate because of the subscription fees they charge.
rangledangle 4y ago
Ah a new low-code tool that will come up when I mash my face against the keyboard. Nice!
nirav72 4y ago
I’m trying to figure why they consider this the next generation of software dev when there are quite a few orcastration tools similar to this that have been out for a while and have a community behind them. n8n or node-red are just two examples that come to mind.
api 4y ago
It depresses me that SaaS is called “software” in the same way that software you can run is software. Plugging together APIs to services isn’t the same thing as creating software people can actually run. Pragmatically your service Rube Goldberg machine breaks as soon as anything it’s made of makes a breaking change or goes down. Then there’s the fact that anything built this way has zero privacy, a massive security surface area that you can’t even know let alone control, and eternal rent that must be paid for every piece that can be raised at any time. What a dystopia we created. I say we because we all did it. We had to make software “free” and killed commercial software business models, but the only thing we accomplished was to push it all to the cloud and to a model that is substantially more closed than closed source commercial ever was. Lesson: you get what you incentivize. Always, always, always ask “what is being incentivized here?”
Mandatum 4y ago
Finally n8n with some funding. Or Tines, but less expensive (and a little bit worse).
sgammon 4y ago
> Postman Flows is a generation leap in software development. that's a bit of a stretch
dzhiurgis 4y ago
Coming from Salesforce ecosystem where they literally have same no-code tool called Flow, here are the problems: 1. not performant 2. clunky ui makes hard to iterate - you frequently need to duplicate tabs 3. gets very messy pretty quickly 4. enables dumb people design terrible solutions (ok for small biz, terrible for big complex firms) 5. little ways to test or debug 6. underlying representation is impossible to use in git 7. impossible to refactor The worst part Salesforce sells this extremely hard and tons of smart important people fall for it.
oregano 4y ago
Their demo looks nice in terms of the ‘flow’ building UX. I’d be willing to bet they’re using React Flow[0] as the primary rendering engine of this tool. [0] reactflow.dev

45 points by vishnumenon 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

I love the idea of this. Reminds me of Yahoo Pipes, which was years ahead of its time. But I'm not so sure they're going to get the adoption they're after. Even the developers I know who are enthusiastic about Postman for its core offering haven't really responded to Postman's push to move more of the development cycle into the application, and I can't imagine this will be the thing to pull them in.

darkteflon 4y ago
Yeah I don’t really understand why my API testing framework is the right place for any of this. Edit: Unless my API framework wants to own all my shit.
- detaro 4y ago
  > wants to own all my shit. They need to justify having taken hundreds of millions in funding somehow...

theogravity 4y ago

How is this the next generation if Yahoo Pipes did it over 16 years ago (wiki says launched in 2007)? It's nice to see a modern version of it, though.

preommr 4y ago

I have high hopes for this. Postman somehow managed to make a slow, bloated, piece-of-crap api-tester that's somehow wildly popular. Extrapolating from that, I expect this to be incredibly successful regardless of how good it is.

somehnguy 4y ago
I use Postman every single day and have very similar feelings towards it as you. Simple things that would make it exponentially more friendly to use just aren’t there, and I can’t believe they haven’t been added in the years it has existed. It updates itself occasionally but never gets any better! All that said - know of any better alternatives?
- capableweb 4y ago
  I used to be a fan of Postman (in the early beginnings of the tool), but as it added features I didn't use and became slower and slower, I got tired of it. Eventually, I figured I should try something true and tested, so I went for cURL. It takes a bit of practice and memory to learn how to do even the basics, but once it's there, it's a rock solid tool, with support for almost everything you could think of.
  - rhaway84773 4y ago
    I used to use Postman exclusively, but like you started trying curl. And then I realized curl was absolutely brilliant for my common uses because I’d write simple scripts that would mean all I needed to pass in were the arguments that changed. I took it another step further and had my script lookup a folder that had a whole bunch of different types of requests that I could then trigger with a single command. Finally, I created a version that plugged into fzf and made it super easy for me to run a whole bunch of common scripts trivially from the command line. The great thing about command line based programs is the incredible ease with which you can create repeatable series of commands that can be run both interactively or programmatically, and the UX can be tailored to suit the specific needs of what you’re trying to do.
  - dzhiurgis 4y ago
    I always get red flags when you send someone curl example and they ask for postman
- XorNot 4y ago
  jupyterlab, Python and requests. That ecosystem will do everything Postman can do, has broad support, and a much closer relationship to your actual code.

throwway120385 4y ago

I don't know why but I'm always tickled when someone comes up with yet another data-oriented / flow diagram programming language like NI LabView. And my first thought is always "this will break down exactly like LabView and for the same reasons." Someone will inevitably come up with a use case that is just a little too complicated but without any mechanism to go from data flow to program code there are going to be some really painful migrations.

rhaway84773 4y ago
There wasn’t a single day i used labview that I did not wish it was a simpler CLI or text file based program. Heck, even an imperative text based programming language would have been fine. And Labview was one of the best Visual programming tools I’ve used and possibly in existence.

prng2021 4y ago

The 101st, no 1001st, iteration of a no-code platform. Soon to support low-code as well I’m sure.

sytringy05 4y ago
lol, here's my visual flow which consists of "start" -> "script node" -> "end" Still, people buy Dell Boomi and Mulesoft, so it's not like there's no market for this rubbish

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

I would love to see a new term to replace "software development" that describes the sorts of task that Postman (Flows) are appropriate for. "Application development" is a bit of a throwback, but it's a good start. This stuff has nothing to do with the majority of software development if measured by task type, even if it has everything to do with the majority of "software development" if narrowed down to browser/web-centric data presentation and editing domains. This has nothing to offer embedded systems, creative software, operating systems, high performance computing, LLMs and so much more.

lowken 4y ago

Postman is the most amazing software development tool I have used in my 20+ year career.

bigmattystyles 4y ago

Isn't this just Jupyter Notebook with a nicer interface?

throwawaaarrgh 4y ago

APIs aren't a step forward, they're a step back. They're a terrible abstraction. Their interfaces are versioned and often not backwards compatible, data exchange is often poorly documented using no common conventions, the underlying HTTP interfaces vary greatly, there's no universal way to read the docs, and there is no single standard or convention for them. Compare to Unix. Single way to run something, one simple return status, one basic input stream, two basic output streams, standard key=value pairs that can be inherited and passed on, generic arguments, there's usually a man page that fully explains how to use it, and they can be infinitely chained. APIs require way too much "integration" and provide too little utility, and zero composeability. They're extra work with less usefulness. But, hey, "it's the web", and we're all too chickenshit to buck any trend that starts. We're slaves to whatever shitty paradigm takes over on "the web". The web killed computer science innovation. We're just slowly and poorly rebuilding an operating system on top of a browser. But with more complexity and less utility.

clocker 4y ago
Well, you wouldn’t be able to type this rant here without the web!

benatkin 4y ago

> Postman Flows is a generation leap in software development. I think not. It seems like Yahoo! Pipes. It's cool but I don't see most devs using it. And FWIW Scratch is way cooler. It could still be nice but that's exaggerating it a whole lot, I think. Pipedream could be much further along. https://pipedream.com/ https://pipedream.com/

ramraj07 4y ago
This seems a hard thing for many if not most devs but even in the most hardcore software company most employees are not devs. If anything the smartest people in your org are not the devs (unless you’re FAAnG). Any tool that puts more power into the non devs is a great tool. Any person managing a company that needs to string apis together and perform high touch service would need a tool like this. Now why this tool and not any other RPA is a different question.
- benatkin 4y ago
  Look at the examples though. See the second one. In the animation, it shows the dot distributing the different values within a response, as though it's some parallel task. Outside of that it's serializing an array on time for no reason I can tell. That's like the Jump to Conclusions Mat in Office Space...

stonogo 4y ago

The next generation of software development won't cost $20/mo to use.

rhaway84773 4y ago
Is there anywhere in the world where an even a 1% improvement in efficiency wouldn’t pay for itself? That’s a $24k/yr salary. If you used 10 $20/mo software tools, that would cost you $2400/yr. That hardly seems unreasonable.
- stonogo 4y ago
  Sure, it seems super reasonable. That's why you pay for things like Python, GCC, Go, etc. It's also why Chrome dominates the browser market -- they can innovate because of the subscription fees they charge.

rangledangle 4y ago

Ah a new low-code tool that will come up when I mash my face against the keyboard. Nice!

nirav72 4y ago

I’m trying to figure why they consider this the next generation of software dev when there are quite a few orcastration tools similar to this that have been out for a while and have a community behind them. n8n or node-red are just two examples that come to mind.

api 4y ago

It depresses me that SaaS is called “software” in the same way that software you can run is software. Plugging together APIs to services isn’t the same thing as creating software people can actually run. Pragmatically your service Rube Goldberg machine breaks as soon as anything it’s made of makes a breaking change or goes down. Then there’s the fact that anything built this way has zero privacy, a massive security surface area that you can’t even know let alone control, and eternal rent that must be paid for every piece that can be raised at any time. What a dystopia we created. I say we because we all did it. We had to make software “free” and killed commercial software business models, but the only thing we accomplished was to push it all to the cloud and to a model that is substantially more closed than closed source commercial ever was. Lesson: you get what you incentivize. Always, always, always ask “what is being incentivized here?”

Mandatum 4y ago

Finally n8n with some funding. Or Tines, but less expensive (and a little bit worse).

sgammon 4y ago

> Postman Flows is a generation leap in software development. that's a bit of a stretch

dzhiurgis 4y ago

Coming from Salesforce ecosystem where they literally have same no-code tool called Flow, here are the problems: 1. not performant 2. clunky ui makes hard to iterate - you frequently need to duplicate tabs 3. gets very messy pretty quickly 4. enables dumb people design terrible solutions (ok for small biz, terrible for big complex firms) 5. little ways to test or debug 6. underlying representation is impossible to use in git 7. impossible to refactor The worst part Salesforce sells this extremely hard and tons of smart important people fall for it.

oregano 4y ago

Their demo looks nice in terms of the ‘flow’ building UX. I’d be willing to bet they’re using React Flow[0] as the primary rendering engine of this tool. [0] reactflow.dev