I agree that CLI are awesome and you can do way more using it that with any other UI (specially a web one), but taking HTTP API testing as an example, postman lets you do a bunch of stuff that are so simple with one click that I can see some people not wanting to dive in the CLI world, write a bunch of stuff and also having to store environment data for requests with extra files (I think thats where the 'difficult' from the previous comment comes along, but that's just me guessing...)
Taking that into consideration, Postman's web interface lets you
- See all the request history that you can easily reply any of them with one click
- Save requests and share them (including a collection of requests)
- Have and share environment variables to change, for example, between production and development API urls, password, params, etc (I know, a CLI also lets you do that, but it soooo simple to just select and preview the environment variables from the list)
- easily handle oAuth and other authentication forms out of the box
But you will suffer (a lot) trying to use Postman to
- Handle binary input/outputs
- Stream responses
- Handle cookies
So, depending on what your day to day problems are you should use a different tool... Oh, and I didn't know about HTTPie, thanks for sharing :)
None of those things are intractable, I have had scripts handle them all.
On top of that, writing scripts educates you on how such systems work. It really isn't challenging.
Sure. I can script a lot of things and have learned a ton by doing that. But when I'm focused on making an API or debugging one, I don't want to spend the time writing a script if there is a readily available tool that does what I need. I can better spend the time improving the app.
Taking that into consideration, Postman's web interface lets you
- See all the request history that you can easily reply any of them with one click
- Save requests and share them (including a collection of requests)
- Have and share environment variables to change, for example, between production and development API urls, password, params, etc (I know, a CLI also lets you do that, but it soooo simple to just select and preview the environment variables from the list)
- easily handle oAuth and other authentication forms out of the box
But you will suffer (a lot) trying to use Postman to - Handle binary input/outputs
- Stream responses
- Handle cookies
So, depending on what your day to day problems are you should use a different tool... Oh, and I didn't know about HTTPie, thanks for sharing :)