Wednesday, 25 July 2012

Little stats :)

I've just check that Advanced Rest Client have great stats :)
According to Google Analytics, daily almost 5 thousand of you are using this application! In last month there was 30 thousands unique users that have opened application! And Chrome Web Store claims that there is 33587 weekly users.
Thanks :)

Tuesday, 17 July 2012

Work on new version in progress... :)

If you're wondering when new version of Rest Client will be available I just wanna let you know that it will happen in next one or two months.
Why so long? - you probably ask. Well, it will be totally new version. Whole application is writing right now from scratch. And this needs time :(
Picture below is showing application's start up flow diagram. That shows how many operations is needed to run the application.



What is new in the application? 
First at all: the projects. If you have more than one endpoint of the same webapplication (developer server, test server, production server, etc) then you will can save WebRequests under one project. When you open project you will be able to quickly switch between endpoints and define which part of URL need to change (either protocol, host, path or params) and to what it should change.

For example you have REST project under http://dev.rest.com/api?key=mydevkey&restOfParams
Then you might want to switch to production server but it's host address is http://myproject.com and there you have different API key. 
By creating a project you can define reference URL address http://dev.rest.com/api?key=mydevkey&restOfParams (you can give it a name, like "dev"). Then, for another endpoint, you'll tell the app that it must change server value and key param when switching between endpoints (to defined values).


Second big change in application is closer integration with chrome extensions API.
Now, you can't set some of headers (like cookie, user, user-agent etc). It's not permitted by XMLHttpRequest spec. Using Chrome API application can change headers just before sending request to server, omitting specification restrictions.

Proposed change is integration with Google Drive. Instead of sending saved requests to application's server (app engine) you'll be able to save it to Google Drive and share it with co-workers. It's safer way for you and cheaper for me ;)

Next change is integration with external extensions. Some of you emailed to me to give them possibility to access to the application via extensions communication system (to run application, to replace results window, etc). I'm working on this and it should be available in next version. 

That's all for now.
I'd like to hear feedback from you! If you have suggestions write to me, please.