react-electron-rest-client (RERC)

A Fast, Intuitive Cross Platform REST Client using React and Electron

REST clients are one of developer's main tools. Although there are great clients out there, I feel there are enough pain points where an alternative, such as RERC can fill the void.

For the initial version, it is based on the electron-react-boilerplate as the starting point.

Main Objectives

Simple

There are simple REST clients out there, but some parts of the simple interface are not intuitive. RERC focuses on intuitive UI:

Fast to load

On the other hand, while other REST clients might have nice interfaces, they take forever to load. RERC focuses on fast load times. Real-time load time:

Easy to contribute

I think the first two objectives are attainable, but it would take me a long time to achieve. Therefore, I want to keep the codebase easy to contribute to. Hopefully, we can achieve this third goal w/o sacrificing too much in terms of maintainability, scalability, and other best practices.

Usage

Binary install is available here for Windows platform.

IF you want to work with the source or if you'd like to try this on Mac/Linux, it is simple to compile from source to run the app locally. Full instructions are available at the electron-react-boilerplate site. Short version is provided below:

Install

• Note: requires a node version >= 7 and an npm version >= 4.

First, clone the repo via git:

$ git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/johnwoolee/react-electron-rest-client.git your-project-name

And then install dependencies with npm.

$ cd your-project-name
$ npm install

Run

Start the app in the dev environment.

$ npm run dev

Immediate Future

Proof of Concept

Right now, I'm focused on getting a simple version in a intuitive UI with minimal features i.e.

• HTTP Method
• URL
• Response
• Request Body

Initial Version

• Make an executable app on Windows and Mac and make sure the performance (mainly load time) is acceptable.
• If performance is unacceptable, ponder alternatives such as starting with incorporating React + Electron from scratch instead of using the Bootstrapped (aka boilerplate) version.

Come up with Roadmap for v1

Possibly add things like:

• ability to save requests
  • into collections
• history
  • collapse/expand all history into dates
  • for performance:
    • load last 10 history items with infinite scroll
    • don't load the history panel until other UI elements are already drawn
• JSON body formatting (something I care about...)