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Saved by Jeff Lindsay
on January 30, 2009 at 12:39:37 pm
 

Also check out webhooks.org for more up to date information on web hooks or the Google Group for discussion!

 

What are web hooks?

Web hooks let you customize, extend and integrate the web applications you use with anything else you can access programmatically. To web developers, web hooks are a simple design pattern that only require the ability to make web requests and to store some extra data about users. To users, web hooks are a way to get events and data in realtime from their web applications. From this they can use the data however they like, empowering them with the ability to extend and integrate, and start seeing the true vision of the programmable web.

 

How do they work?

By letting the user specify a URL for various events, the application will POST data to those URLs when the events occur. With the cheap availability of PHP hosting and even easier simple app/script hosting like AppJet, handling the POST data becomes fairly trivial. How you use it is up to you and whatever you want to accomplish. Among other things, you can:

 

  • create notifications to you or anybody via email, IRC, Jabber, ...
  • put the data in another app (real-time data synchronization)
  • process the data and repost it using the app's API
  • validate the data and potentially prevent it from being used by the app

 

Why should I care?

As integrated as we perceive the web, most web applications today operate in silos. With the rise of API's we've seen mashups and some degree of integration between applications. However, we have not seen the vision of the programmable web: a web where you as the user can "pipe" data between apps much like the Unix command line. Some say RSS is the answer. They are wrong. The heart is in the right place, but the implementation is wrong. RSS is still useful, but it is not going to bring us the true programmable web.

 

We just need a simple way to get data out in real-time to let the%2

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