One of the common requirements in web application development is testing your API’s.
In an era of API first apps , most of the functionalities in a web app are exposed as APIs to the outer world and to test these you need a tool.
Postman has been widely used for this purpose.
Postman has tons of features and often you may need it only to hit APIs with requests and see if you get the required response are not.
You also may need additional features like sending headers and authentication credentials along with the request.
Thunder Clients serves these purposes.
source: https://rangav.medium.com/
It is better than VS Code for the below reasons:
- It is light weight
Postman consumes a lot of RAM and if your system has low configuration , postman may very well hang at times. Every additional hit you make to postman slows it down a bit.
Thunder Client on the other hand is light weight.
2. It need not be installed separately
Unlike postman Thunder Client comes as an extension to VS Code.
This means you can install it within VS Code and for testing the APIs you need not move out of your editor. This saves time and improves productivity.
3. It is quite good for simple use cases
Thunder Client has a simple interface whereas Postman is relatively complex. So for simple testing of APIs Thunder Client can be preferred.
Thunder Client was developed by a single developer Ranga Vadhineni when he found the usage of postman complex and decided to develop his own tool.
Here is his story :
https://rangav.medium.com/thunder-client-alternative-to-postman-68ee0c9486d6
Alternatively for complex API development and testing , postman offers more features and can be preferred in place of Thunder Client.
To install Thunder Client go to VS Code Extensions , search for Thunder Client and install.
The tool appears on the left pane with the symbol of a thunder and you can start using it!
Check it out:
Thunder Client
https://www.thunderclient.com/
Postman:
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