What Web Applications Do You Know Using Webhooks

Question

Description of how a webhook works from http://webhooks.pbwiki.com/ -

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...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

Who is using web hooks?

DevjaVu, BitBucket, GitHub, Shopify, Versionshelf, PayPal (IPN), Jott (Links), IMified, PBwiki, Facebook (Platform, sort of), Mailhook.org, SMTP2Web, Astrotrain, Notifixious, Assembla, ZenDesk, Google Code

Do you know of any good uses of webhooks?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, the wiki is not the most up to date list of known implementations. I have my own list that I'll put on the wiki when I get around to reorganizing it. Some not mentioned in the current list:

• Gnip
• Google Code (Project Hosting)
• Checkout by Amazon (both for notifications and as actual callbacks with return data)
• Hubilicious
• Beanstalk
• Google Checkout
• MailChimp
• SurveyGizmo
• Hey!Watch
• MySpace (for app developers)

Answer 2

I know shopify is using webhooks quite successfully now. By extension so is fetchapp uses them as well. You either are sending an xml file, or receiving one and doing your own processing logic on it.

Oh and shopify's wiki in the link has a whole write up about how to implement it in your app.

Answer 3

OfficeAutopilot has an interesting version of webhooks.. they use their rule interface to trigger API posts. Can trigger in response to any system event.. email opens, clicks, page visits, purchases, etc, etc.

Answer 4

Kiln 1.2 uses webhooks much like GitHub, BitBucket, etc.

(Disclaimer: I'm a Kiln/FogBugz dev.)

Answer 5

Say for example you want to get data from any API( eg. twitter, facebook etc.,). Instead of you polling the data for every few minutes/seconds, it POSTS the data to the specified URL, whenever it is available.

By using this, you will avoid unnecessary polling like say you poll and data is not there yet.

Answer 6

AlertGrid is the webhook consumer. You can configure it to accept http calls from ANY source and raise alert (email, sms, phone) to a specified person or group of people (works worldwide!) whenever the parameters in the http callback meet your criteria or when the http call was expected but it didn't occur (kind of 'heartbeat' monitoring). There is a visual editor for you to easily create rules.

Apart from notifying people by sms or email it can also notify existing applications by sending the http requests to their APIs.

It can also visualise data received in http callbacks and show the history.