Paw (HTTP & REST Client) App Reviews

I’ve been using PAW for a while and the recent changes which added generated code and dynamic values was unexpected and very powerful. The online catalog of community contributed code generation templates was also an unexpected addition. I plan on contributing my own templates. It is a tool every developer should have.

Paw is awesome. If you’ve ever used curl in Terminal, even once, just buy this immediately. I love this app. I use it every single day. It is indespensible. It is excellently made. It is exceptionally useful. It is elegently designed. I’m running out of adjectives.

This app works well for testing web APIs. It would be nice to see two missing features. It would be great to see a new type of extension that take a JSON template as input and outputs the request data formatted for a particular RPC protocol such as JSON-RPC or SOAP. The code generator would be much more useful if you could specify keys expected in the response (JSON or XML) and map them to return values or object values. One method could be to simplly allow JSON formatted metadata for each API call to be passed to the code generator. That would allow you to specify your result schema for generating object mapping and result validation code. DashCode had an interesting HTTP response to object mapping system.

This is an incredible REST client when it is not crashing. Unfortunately it is crashing over almost anything. I have sent support requests and have not even received a reply.

Fantastic REST Client app. There seems to be a memory leak in which if I leave PAW running it will take all my memory and crash the app or my mac. I tend to just bring up PAW, do my testing and close it down before too much damage is done. Minus two stars just because of this. The app is so great and feature rich that I can deal with this problem until it is fixed.

I work as an API Product Manager at a startup and downloaded this app about a year ago. I now see almost everyone at our company involved with developing, testing or using our APIs using it. It’s very well organized, super functional, and always being upgraded with new features. Here’s what I find useful: - Organize API calls, request structures, API keys, etc all in a centralized location - Easily share test data across team - Makes APIs pretty and fun to look at / understand for those that may be less familiar! - Package up a series of requests for demos / walkthroughs - Quickly create curl requests on the fly to send to testers/devs/ops (add-ons available for many other languages as well)

I’ve only been using PAW for a few weeks but I find it extremely useful for testing, and understanding, our new services as they come online. I use it at work and at home on fun projects. It’s been a real pleasure to use. The code generation options are especially great for iOS and Mac Developers, but you can use it to generate code for other things as well. Highly recommended for your development toolbox.

Please add support for opening json/yml config files compatible with swagger.io

In case my title didn’t get the point accross .. THANK YOU!!! This worked amazing for me today as I was building several REST interfaces that I needed to test and debug!

Love using this app. As others have said, it’s a great tool to help with development. My only comment is I would like to see the documentation expanded a little.

After experiencing many bugs in this app I decided to try an alternative (postman). I have since returned back to Paw and can tell that things are getting better but I feel that they are just trying to play catch up with other similar tools. However they do Have a great UI/UX and I’m sure we would all love to see some of the well known missing features included in future releases since this is a paid product.

OSX has needed a tool like this for a very long time. Paw is so feature complete that I cannot think of anything it is missing. It handles: * Setting and storing request and response cookies * HTTP(S) headers (it has a list of standard ones in case you forget the spelling) * Authorization: OAuth1 and OAuth2, Amazon S3 signatures, Basic Auth * Set timeouts * Multipart forms, binary uploads, JSON requests * All restful actions GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, TRACE, HEAD and OPTIONS * Saves and organizes all API calls in an approachable structure * Many more features than I could list here After you setup the call and test, it can generate a CURL command line, Ruby Net::HTTP code, JQuery/Ajax code or several others. As a software engineer, this is likely the best $29 I’ve spent in the App store.

I’ve been migrating several older Rails and PHP web-apps over to be more RESTful rails-api based. Over the last couple of years I’ve played around with several REST client tools like this but always ended up with a script of CURL one-liners in the end because the tools seemed to get in the way more than actually help. With PAW things are very different and for the first time the tool actually seems to work for and with me. A couple of things I would really like to see added: 1. Environment variables are awesome, how about being able to add environment wide headers. For example I use token based authentication on nearly every API call and it would be great to be able to set this once environment or group wide. 2. I realize this may not be the best tool for this, but with a few expectation matchers this could be really be useful for integration testing. Since I have a full set of API calls in Paw and they can all be called with a button click it would be amazing to just do full integration tests right here by matching expected results and response codes.

I almost cant cope with how much I enjoy using this app over the commandline. It has a slick, useful interface and has been able to do everything Ive needed thus far. It seems to be actively developed and improved with every version. My hat is off to the developer.

I have used postman in the past, but after searching for a native, more reliable solution, and everything I read pointed me to this app. I am happy to say that it has exceeded all of my expectations. The flexibility that custom environments gives me, along with all of the other customization makes me much more productive as a developer. I recommend this to any programmer looking for the best native REST client available on the Mac.

It has infinite amount of features and options, but such a lovely simple UI to access all of them, I’m constantly blown away. If you manage to think of something it doesn’t do, you can write an extension (but someone likely already has done so). If you ever do anything with APIs, this app will pay for itself within minutes.

Missing SOCKS proxy support, and large POST requests crash the app, making it a pain to use for basically anything I do professionally.

I use this app too much not to write a glowing review. It has helped me automate the construction of API wrappers in Python, and now it’s helping me build my own RESTful API. Fantastic tool to make APIs comprehensible and usable for builders and consumers.

Paw is by far the best REST client for OS X. I’m a Application Development Team Lead and I am constantly working on our own product’s RESTful API as well as working with third party APIs for a number of different integrations and I use Paw on a daily basis. It has a ton of features and a fairly straight-forward interface. There hasn’t been anything I’ve needed so far that it doesn’t allow me to do. I highly recommend this app if you work with APIs often.

Because Paw costs more than an impulse buy and there is no in-app purchase approach, you have to fish around and find the non-App Store version to try. But it is absolutely worth it. This is the “killer app” for REST API work/exploration. The tiny thorn is no big deal and the short story is that this utility has become a critical part of my dev tool library and a joy to use. As for the tiny thorn, read on if interested. Note the 5 star rating. A rarity as I set a lifetime limit of my age for 5 star ratings. So you fire up Paw, form your first REST call, you execute it via a “Send Request” button and the button is replaced by output. You quickly become enamored with all the options and the very clean formatting of the output… this thing purrs. Then you realize there is no “Send Request” button when you want to modify the REST parameters a little bit and do it again. Encountering this glaring exception up front makes you wonder how is likely that many more warts exist. And it looks a little like that hotmess called Xcode… so I deleted the app and moved on. (Dec 2015) Now Feb 2016, reading reviews today and one review mentioned that command-return is used execute the REST call a second time. So, after downloading Paw again from the non-App Store site, and giving it another try with “command return”, the rest of the app becomes very impressive… short of the thorn... So if “command return” is obvious and the round arrow thingy is obvious, then there is no need for the original “Send Request” button. BUT, if “command return” and the round arrow thingy is not obvious, then the “Send Request” hello-kitty approach might need to be rethought. Perhaps a “Send” next to the URL vs the round arrow thing and be done with it? Now that I know, good to go. But... Long story short, I almost didn’t buy this and went another direction because of the tiny thorn. That would have been a shame for both the developer and for me as this is the “Cat’s Meow” of REST testing and evaluation. I love the free GraphicalHttpClient and it worked very well with a straight forward interface, but Paw ate it for lunch. Paw’s operation is superb and has just about everything you ever wanted in an app that you use as a beginner REST explorer to the experienced ObjC / Cocoa developer needing to cut some trial and error out of the software development cycle. While the price is a little high, high enough to make you look around for an alternative, it is not out of reason. There are free tools out there that can give you most of what Paw can do but not all in one place and not all of it. Over all, looking forward to using this more and replacing a handfull of other tools with Paw. Have not tried the code generators yet but looking forward to that too. What scares me a bit is that you never know when Apple will have a hairball over some feature in an App and reject it from the store and thus your investment in the app goes poof.