Webhooks Have Me Hooked

by Bill Rawlinson —

Today, of all days, I have been inundated by discussions concerning webhooks. First I saw this post over at Jon Udell’s blog where Andy Singleton mentions how great webhooks are. Then, a little later, I saw a post by Timothy Fitz about webhooks linked on reddit.com

It seemed clear that I should investigate and I’m glad I did. Webhooks are, really, a no-brainer. As one person described them they are “triggers for the web” - an analogy that only makes sense if you’re familiar with databases but apt nonetheless.

So, you’ve made it this far but don’t feel like reading the linked articles? No problem, I’ll tell you what webhooks are.

Let’s say you have an application, oh - i dunno, like this blog. On the blog you do a few different things but the most common action is to post a new blog entry. Blogs have actually long supported the idea of a webhook but you may not have realized a “ping” was a webhook. Basically, what happens is that when you publish a new post a separate http call is made to the aggregator site. A ping is super simple - it just calls the url with a special parameter and the receiving server then knows your blog, specifically, was updated.

However, any RESTful service could be the target so that when you do an action on your application an http call to the REST service, along with some properly formatted XML, could be made and bam some entirely new process might be set off.

Let’s say you run a small theater and you use something like MS Outlook to keep track of your calendar of events. A webhook could be present that sends that same event off to your online calendar at the same moment for instant synchronization and publication to your theater’s website.

Tim has a more mundane but probably more useful example:

I imagine a future where twitter feed updates instantly call a webhook. I’ve pointed that webhook at a service that does bayesian filtering. The filtering has been set up to determine if the tweet looks time-sensitive “Anyone interested in getting dinner tonight?” vs time-insensitive “Webhooks are cool.” Time sensitive posts call another webhook, this time set to sms my phone. Note that nowhere in this future am I writing any code. I don’t have to.

Webhooks have been around for a while but it seems likely that they will become far more ubiquitous in the future.

Here are some links for further reading: