While in college, I’ve been trying to stay current with the latest software techniques by learning a couple of frameworks and API’s, it’s kinda hard to keep up with all the new technology that’s coming out but when you enjoy developing software nothing makes you more happy. Two months ago I was searching for articles about how future websites would be programmed or how a future web might look like when I came across a video in YouTube titled “Web Hooks and the Programmable World of Tomorrow”  presented by Jeff Lindsay, a software developer, and main evangelist for the idea of “webhooks”.

So What Are Web hooks and What Can Web hooks do?

At first webhooks might sound like the RSS feeds we are all familiar with, when I watched the video, to me they sounded like almost the same thing. Now that I’ve read a couple of articles on the topic I can say the following

• With RSS feeds, information is not instantaneous because feeds are cached,
• RSS brings the problem of polling which basically means that the RSS reader or program asks the server to send it the information at time intervals even if nothing new has happend ( e.g. a new article was posted )

with web hooks on the other hand

• information is instantaneous because because it is the server that sends information to the script or reader only when a new action has occurred. You can see from this that not only is information been shared near real-time but your server is also not wasting time handling unnecessary requests.( btw, web hooks are not limited to XML )

In short, we can say that web hooks are “hooks” on a particular web site from which users can “hang” programs/apps by proving a script’s URL that let them do whatever the app was design to do. As you might expect from my previous sentence, the answer to what “what can web hooks do?” is limited to what a programmer can do with a particular language and the info provided by the server. You, the onwer of the site, would of course have to enable web hooks.

Are They Easy To Implement?

Jeff Lindsay likes to claim that all it takes is one line of code to enable these hooks, and that’s true for the basic integration, but he admits that there is more to it than that, let me pull out a quote from one of his articles on this topic.

I like to claim you can implement web hooks with one line of code. The reality is you need to do more than make inline HTTP requests. You need to manage user callback URLs, you need to make the requests asynchronous, you probably want a retry scheme, you might want authentication or verification, and in some cases a response handling mechanism.

Who Is Using Web hooks?

Web hooks are actually not a brand new concept, they just have not been implemented as widely as other technologies, here are two sites that have web hooks enabled.

http://www.mailchimp.com/api/webhooks/

http://wiki.shopify.com/WebHook

To find out more about about web hooks visit:

http://blog.webhooks.org/