Dhruv, I agree there is effort involved in implementing webhooks. Your assessment mostly sound. Perhaps some details can be simplified. It comes down to 1) letting the user give you a callback URL, 2) deciding what events to trigger on and invoking that callback. You don't need to let users provide a different URL for each event. You don't need to define upfront what events you trigger on except for documentation.
Those two things alone should not be considerable effort for an average web developer. The hard parts are in the details. Hookah is an open source HTTP request queue and dispatcher made for deploying webhooks. You might look into that. I'm sprinting on it next week and refactoring the PSHB hub module out into a separate project. Also, this might have been more appropriate on the webhooks mailing list? *shrug* -jeff On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 8:19 PM, dhruvg <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hey all, > > So, there has been a lot of talk about HTTP pubsub with Webhooks. But > the assumption is that many existing web services will actually > implement Webhook functionality. When I say 'implement', I am > referring to the following: > > - adding the feature to allow the creation of callback URLs to various > events > - creating the various types of events that you can associate callback > URLs for > - making a logic layer for triggering these events and assembling the > appropriate event data to send to the callback URL > > The above three things seem to require a considerable effort from the > average web developer. Is this assessment wrong? If so, are there any > statistics on Webhook uptake in web services? > > If this assessment is sound, are there any open source projects in > development which can provide web developers with an easy and > intuitive way to provide the above three things so the Webhook ? > Because the easier it is to do the three things above, the more > popular HTTP pubsub (and in effect, PSHB protocol) will become, right? > > Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. > > Dhruv -- Jeff Lindsay http://webhooks.org -- Make the web more programmable http://shdh.org -- A party for hackers and thinkers http://tigdb.com -- Discover indie games http://progrium.com -- More interesting things
