WEB HOOKS

and the
Programmable World of Tomorrow

Jeff Lindsay
three years after coining web hooks, people are starting to get excited about them.
i’m going to share what they are, why they’re significant, and what’s going on
in the growing web hooks ecosystem
 WEB HOOKS
and the
Programmable World of Tomorrow

Jeff Lindsay
i’ve given a version of this talk before, but this time i’d like to try and focus on this
“programmable” idea that helped inspire web hooks.
 WARNING:
Emergent dynamics described ahead.

was a guy really excited hearing about web hooks, but was disappointed to see what they are.
i’m describing a game changer based on a mechanism that takes one line of code to describe.
seems so simple, people assume you can only do simple things. quite the contrary...
go. simple mechanisms can create rich dynamics.
easily teach somebody the rules, doesn’t mean they see the implications of those rules.
i want to share the implications of this simple mechanism.
in 1997, jon udell talks about websites as data sources that can be reused and remixed
today that idea isn’t very novel
 “a new programming paradigm
that takes the whole Internet
as its platform”
he envisions the Internet as a programming paradigm
 The Programmable Web
“The Web as Platform”

it starts to manifest as the programmable web and talk of “the web as a platform”
 The Programmable Web
APIs and Mashups

john musser here starts to track apis and mashups in 2005. there are now over 1k apis and
increasingly more.
apis and mashups became the foundation of the programmable web...
 Pro g ramm at ic
The Programmable Web
APIs and Mashups

but are they? after thinking about web hooks and what they can give us, i realized apis and mashups
don’t make a programmable web. they make a programmatic web
 Pro g ramm at ic
The Programmable Web
Twitter API lets you use Twitter programmatically.
It does not let you program Twitter to do more.

they let you use web apps programmatically. they don’t let you program them to do more,
whereas web hooks can. so i like to argue that web hooks will bring about the *real* programmable
web.
 Web Service

interwebz

User

so let’s get specific. here’s an example scenario showing the use of web hooks.
Web Service
Hi, I’m Twickr,
a new web service.

interwebz

User
 “Twickr”

Cool. Sign me up.

interwebz

User
 “Twickr”
Okay, you’re all set.
Now listen...

interwebz

User
 “Twickr”
I might find myself with some
data you might be interested in.

interwebz

User
 “Twickr”

Alight, hold on a sec...

interwebz

User
 “Twickr”

interwebz

User

hack hackety hack

 “Twickr”

Could you just post

it here when you have any?
http://tinyurl.com/6pln4u

interwebz

User
 “Twickr”
...sure, why not.
Hmm, what is that URL?

interwebz

User
 “Twickr”

It’s a tiny handler I put

up on App Engine.

interwebz

User
 “Twickr”
What does it do?

interwebz

User
 “Twickr”

It doesn’t matter to you.

Whatever I want...

interwebz

User

web hooks are just user-defined http callbacks

 Web Service
EXTENSIBLE

interwebz

EMPOWERED
User

but do you see what they did? they made the web service extensible and empowered the
user.
a friend of mine got me to explain web hooks to her. not a programmer, but has iphone.
she compared it to jailbreaking the iphone: letting users do what they want, customize, add
apps, etc
having web hooks is like jailbreaking your web apps. opens functional extensibility.
a pseudo code example of what the heart of implementing web hooks looks like.
SIMPLE: make an HTTP request to a user-specified URL on major events
paypal represents on the oldest web hook implementors
their instant payment notification is a web hook
 “When a customer pays you, PayPal posts a notification to your server at a URL you specify.”

its framed as a notification, but that doesn’t properly imply the usage its intended for:
integration.
started thinking about this in 2006.
everything flashed before my eyes and was very confused why it wasn’t used more.
felt like i was taking crazy pills. today i know why...
compare to REST.
both have been around longer. rest is simpler..
in fact, it’s almost described as “using HTTP properly”
but not until it got a name could it be used in discourse to make it popular
 REST

Hooks

rest apis and web hooks are two sides of the same coin
they complement each other in ways i’ll get to later
but i just want to give this pattern a name, and start associating some ideas with it
 Push

Pipes

Plugins

talk is split into three sections

ways to look at the use of web hooks
icons will hopefully make more sense as i talk about them
 Push
let’s get started with push
people are starting to talk about push and pubsub on the web... although its not the first
time
1998 (predating rss) microsoft submitted an internet draft to extend http
to provide a basic pubsub framework called GENA
it had your standard pubsub terms
and added 4 new methods to http.
it expired a year later in 1999 and the group behind it seemed to disappear.
however...
 Sneaky!

the methods and protocol ended up in the webdav implemented for exchange
but then in 2000, rss 0.92 was released. five years later it gets an icon and widespread
adoption.
it started with blog feeds, then comment feeds...
then soon exploded into twitter feeds, photo feeds, activity feeds, event feeds, bookmark feeds
even feeds of feeds
then soon exploded into twitter feeds, photo feeds, activity feeds, event feeds, bookmark feeds
even feeds of feeds
then soon exploded into twitter feeds, photo feeds, activity feeds, event feeds, bookmark feeds
even feeds of feeds
then soon exploded into twitter feeds, photo feeds, activity feeds, event feeds, bookmark feeds
even feeds of feeds
then soon exploded into twitter feeds, photo feeds, activity feeds, event feeds, bookmark feeds
even feeds of feeds
then soon exploded into twitter feeds, photo feeds, activity feeds, event feeds, bookmark feeds
even feeds of feeds
then soon exploded into twitter feeds, photo feeds, activity feeds, event feeds, bookmark feeds
even feeds of feeds
it makes you think of feeds like in the telecom world
data coming directly to you
but we know that’s not how it works
 ?

instead we have to go request the data

then it gives it to us. and we do this over and over.
are we there yet? are we there yet?
 ?

feeds made sense in a world where feed readers ran on

desktops that couldn’t be pushed to over http
 ?

of course, now we have other web applications consuming feeds and it doesn’t make sense.
even most of our feed readers have become web applications
SUP is a recent incremental solution to increase the efficiency of consuming large amounts of
feeds.
however, its based on polling and is essentially yet another feed,
so i couldn’t help...
 SUP DAWG, WE HEARD YOU LIKE FEEDS
SO WE MADE YOU A FEED OF OUR FEEDS
evan and kellan gave a great talk a while back about this push issue, and their proposed solution:
xmpp
i have a condensed version of this talk. the slides speak for themselves
 (aka XMPP)

they have a great point. polling sucks, and xmpp is a pretty good solution for data streams
but it’s kind of heavy weight. it does a lot and makes a decently complex little system.
luckily it’s not *that* hard to use with today’s library support
evan and kellan did point out there are extremes when it comes to data streams.
most data streams will probably fall somewhere in between,
but i do think xmpp is suited for the fast and furious end
joshua schachter of delicious responded to this talk in a blog post.
he basically suggests web hooks as an alternative
 “One solution that occurred to me at the time was to build a simple callback system over HTTP.
This would fall comfortably between full polling and full persistent publish/subscribe.”

he says they fall comfortably between polling and xmpp. i agree, and think they can cover
most use-cases
others seem to agree....
this is a standard for discovering and subscribing to content changes.
they let you use web hooks OR xmpp, which is nice.
good idea, but (like GENA) standard specs alone don’t get very far
gnip is a service that some may have heard of (but don’t understand)
 Polling

their main goal is to stop polling as a service in the middle.

 Source Destination

Protocol + Mechanism Protocol + Mechanism

Format Format
Web Hooks Web Hooks
RSS RSS
XMPP XMPP
Atom Atom
XML XML
REST REST

Publisher Consumer

they’re basically an adaptor for data streams, letting you pick your own protocol and mechanism, no
matter what the feed publisher is providing.
 Source Destination

Protocol + Mechanism Protocol + Mechanism

Format Format
Web Hooks Web Hooks
RSS RSS
XMPP XMPP
Atom Atom
XML XML
REST REST

Publisher Consumer

however, they recently dropped support to consume via xmpp, making web hooks their primary push
mechanism for consuming data streams.
 Source

Protocol + Mechanism Protocol + Mechanism

Format Format
Web Hooks Web Hooks
RSS RSS
XMPP XMPP
Atom Atom
XML XML
REST REST

Publisher Consumer

as an example, if i wanted to get digg updates via web hooks, gnip will poll digg for me and invoke my
callback with the content as new updates come in.
 Source

Protocol + Mechanism Protocol + Mechanism

Format Format
Web Hooks Web Hooks
RSS RSS
XMPP XMPP
Atom Atom
XML XML
REST REST

Publisher Consumer

alternatively, i could even poll gnip for digg updates. although seemingly redundant, it helps ease the
load on digg and allows gnip to provide filtering functionality.
 Protocol + Mechanism Protocol + Mechanism

Format Format
Web Hooks Web Hooks
RSS RSS
XMPP XMPP
Atom Atom
XML XML
REST REST

Publisher Consumer

but another example might be if twitter provides an xmpp stream, but i already have a polling setup...
gnip would let me poll instead of integrate xmpp.
 microformats

in promoting web hooks, i sort of look up to the way microformats work in values and process.
very ground up, grassroots... take existing popular use-patterns and make it a convention.
microformats can be viewed as an alternative xml+rdf
 xml+rdf vs microformats

“Here's a new language we want you to learn,

and now you need to output these additional
files on your server. It's a hassle.
(Microformats) lower the barrier to entry.”

tantek is a big microformats evangelist. he says....

so i told him about web hooks. “what are they?” “push over http”
“how are they diff than xmpp?” “they’re a lightweight alternative” lower the barrier to entry...
 xmpp vs web hooks

“Good. XMPP needs a competitor.”

he says...

this was encouraging. i mean, when tantek talks, you listen...

if for no other reason than
he gets the chicks
unfortunately, xmpp has many features and proposals to do pubsub that web hooks doesn’t.... after
all, it’s just a creative use of http requests, not a messaging protocol. so in order to do pubsub with
web hooks, you need more to be implemented. well, brad fitzpatrick and brett slatkin are working on
that.
 Push is good.

so the moral here is that push is good and there’s finally a demand for it. we have some good
solutions waiting adoption...
 XMPP is ideal when needed,
but Web Hooks generally do the job.

as far as xmpp vs web hooks, i think they both have their place.
web hooks are easier, so you might as well default to web hooks unless you really need
xmpp.
 But push is not the point.

however, as i framed this talk, it’s really not about push. it’s a nice way to get the social
media kids into bed with web hooks, but hooks are really about more than pubsub and
notifications. otherwise i would have called them web notifications or something...
 Pipes
instead of push, i was more drawn by the pipes metaphor. i wanted to integrate and
orchestrate the web applications i use, conceptually similar to unix pipelining.
so i thought about it. pipes were a really amazing feature that let you get more out of your commands
by letting you chain them together. it sort of let you program without programming, combining
commands in ways that weren’t necessarily intended by the author.
 Input Output

Program

all from a bit of infrastructure involving input and output

 STDIN STDOUT

Program

STDERR

stdin, stdout were available to reroute wherever the user wanted

most common use was chaining commands together: piping
 xargs
wget
echo
mail

grep
wc

cat

so you had all these simple little programs, that might not even be useful alone
 cat

xargs
wget
echo
mail

grep
wc

string them together...

 cat grep

xargs
wget
echo
mail

wc
 cat grep mail

xargs
wget
echo

wc

and you have something more useful than the sum of the parts
 Write programs that do one thing and do it well.

Write programs to work together.

Write programs that handle text streams,

because that is a universal interface.

this helped put forth the unix philosophy and encouraged building these small composable
commands
 STDIN

Program

but it doesn’t work without the output. it just breaks.

 API

Web App

unfortunately that’s how the web is today.

we can talk to web apps, but they really can’t talk to us. or anything else really.
 API Hooks

Web App

it’s not that they can’t, they just don’t. we just need to start putting hooks in so they can.
those roles are best played by mechanisms that use the protocol the web is built on: http
backhoe
 +

front-loader + excavator
 cat grep mail

Basecamp

so we want to combine web applications like we can CLI programs.

get more than the sum of the parts.
web hooks open up this possibility, but need like APIs, need to be implemented
 Basecamp

imagine basecamp with a bunch of hooks for events

Basecamp

Project finished
Todo completed
Milestone created
Contact added
File uploaded
 Basecamp

My handler
http://example.com/handler

users can write handlers that are just web scripts.

they have a url, and thats what you give basecamp
 Basecamp

My handler
http://example.com/handler

it’s code. it can do anything from there.

integrate with other services, make a phone call, order pizza, whatever
 Todos

Basecamp

for example, all these apps share data about todos. they each have respective specialized talents,
but all work with todos. by putting hooks on todo CRUD,
you can use their apis to keep them synced pretty well. magically. real-time.
 Service integration

web hooks enable service integration

 Composability

adding composability to web apps

 Code as glue

based on the idea that web urls can run code. and code can do anything.
when i first thought about this, cheap PHP hosting was all over, but it could be even simpler.
there are paste bins like this one. made to share formatted code with people over IRC or email
put in some code you want to share or ask a question about
 http://pastie.org/84826

hit save and you get a URL you can share when you ask “where’s the data stored?”
i’m thinking of the same thing, but that you write handlers with
 http://pastie.org/run/24576

and saving doesn’t just give a url to view, but to run. pass that url into an app with web hooks
 Basecamp

Project finished
http://pastie.org/run/24576

for example, basecamp. now when you finish a project, everybody meets for shots in the break room.
fortunately, we have this. it’s called appjet by ex googlers.
just hit a button, write code, hit save, share the url. it’s javascript
obviously app engine, although it’s a little more involved than appjet for quick handlers.
but it is an option for python.
and there are ruby/rails hosts like heroku
one thing i’ve been working on is an extension to play with ways end-users might interact
with web hooks
 Hey, there’s an
event hook here!

by detecting some markup in a page, it discovers hooks.

like say for new photos from contacts.
you want to do something when that happens, click it
 Save

and write some code. hit save, it posts to AppJet (or wherever),
registers the handler (assuming a standard protocol), and done. all inline.
go back and change the code.
 Real world examples

but these are all mockups and what-ifs...

there is a world of web hooks already evolving...
i started by exposing svn hooks as web hooks in devjavu
i talked about web hooks enough using pbwiki as an example,
their mysterious cto decided to implement them
and apparently really liked what he found
went all out on hooked events. not sure if it’s made it to production, but really cool
 “Building projects with web hooks in
mind lets me keep the core Lighthouse
source focused, while external
services live in their own libraries.”
--Rick Olson

the idea silently spread to rails guys.

rick olson used them in lighthouse
 “We implemented web hooks a while
ago and people have been building all
sorts of unexpected stuff on top of it.”

--Tobias Lütke

tobias used them in shopify. i’m told he’s revamping their api to have more hooks. they were
one of the earliest adopters and recently had their 1 yr anniversary using web hooks
google code recently caught up other code hosts by providing a post commit hook.
it was very well done, as you’d expect from google and in particular shows that
authentication can be done with hmac signatures
github was one of the first majorly popular site to use and promote web hooks.
they’ve been doing really well with their post-receive hook. users have used it to integrate
with mailing lists, chat, other project management tools, continuous integration, etc
they were so successful with the adhoc integration, they formalized it.
but in the best way! using their existing web hook infrastructure.
they just have modules running in a separate but local web service.
in fact, that lets them open source it. letting people fork, write new handlers, and push back.
this is probably going to be the standard model of service integration.
and a great example of services integrated with github, besides lighthouse, is runcoderun.
they run your regression tests for you. continuous integration in the sky. love it.
they sign you up automatically if you put their hook in github.
and of course i mentioned paypal. but i should mention, web hooks make so much sense
for paypal... they’re not so much about pushing content, but INTEGRATING. that’s what
web hooks are great for, even though they can be used for content push.
jott is another example of a web hook implementer that doesn’t know it.
they parse voice over the phone and do stuff with it, like post to twitter, etc
they do it with “Links”... which are just hooks. they post to a script that does something with
the parsed text. really cool for todos.
 User jotts to The message is Message is sent via Jott reads back the User receives
a Jott Link converted HTTP Post to a response and sends information back
into text web page it via SMS & SMTP

here’s their diagram. totally web hooks.

it become obvious making adaptor services would not only be useful in specific cases, but in
general, it makes sense to have services that will turn other protocols into inputs to the web
hook ecosystem. the first was email... i built mailhook...
GAE community made one because GAE doesn’t have a way to accept email (but will soon).
web hooks were the obvious solution.
rick olson has an open source non-hosted ruby version that will do xmpp.
he uses it for lighthouse.
but smtp2web is interesting because it was made because of the limitations of GAE...
in fact a lot of people made these kinds of “micro webservices” to do simple things GAE
didn’t do. it was the first glimpse at small, focused services that are like the equivalent of
grep, cat, wordcount, etc in the command line piping ecosystem.
then there’s martyn and andy. two guys in the uk that love web hooks.
they built this thing called spaghetti junction at a hackday. it involved into...
switchub. i REALLY love this. i knew this sort of thing would emerge, but i didn’t think it would happen
until web hooks were more popular. kind of like the pastinbin code runner, they let you create hook
inputs with urls to put in apps that you can route to various output handlers: email, irc, etc
my example switchboard. this kind of feels like gnip, only more focused and more about web hooks.
so i like it lots.
opening handlers up like github. anybody can write handlers soon.
working with them a little to make it real awesome.
switchub would benefit from builtin inputs from various other protocols like email, rss, etc...
but instead of having them builtin, they can work with other services to support those kinds
of inputs. for example, rssfwd could easily be modified to provide a web hook for rss
switchub is a lot like how i visualized a way for regular users to orchestrate web apps.
was inspired by reason: virtual rack mounts
flip it around and wire them together however you like. totally cool.
 Plugins
there’s one more thing i want to talk about.
web was a bunch of pages linked together.
but people kept wanting to access other things through the web (like me today)
so they developed cgi
tangent: this is a neat find. was on reddit. andreessen proposing IMG tag.
people fought it, said it needed to be more generalized.
he just put it on mosaic and that was that
so these pages... today... because of cgi
are actually the result
of these higher order nodes... the code... the apps. this is most of the web today.
neat how that evolved
so you have these applications
and the difference you might think is backend and frontend.
but there is a subtly different way to think about it
 Application
Pages

logic and content. the read-write web gave us user contributed content...
i want user contributed (democratized) logic.
 Function
Content

logic and content. the read-write web gave us user contributed content...
i want user contributed (democratized) logic.
 Integrate

Function
Content

not just integrating and composing apps

 Extend
Integrate

Function
Content

but extending apps...

almost called this section Platforms.
platforms are really cool. we all love them.
i LOVE them, so fb platform was really cool.
asked a friend how it worked. he said “web hooks”
sure enough, this looks like web hooks to me. as long as it’s http, calling out... but then using the
results in their app? thats different...
in fact a few people have used web hooks for plugins. dabble is a great example.
they do online databased for people that use excel as a database.
their plugin API is great. it uses web hooks!
 “Dabble plugins allow Dabble applications to create new, derived fields by calling out
to external HTTP-accessible applications. This solves the problem of safely enabling
extension of a centrally-located hosted application, in that, while you’re writing code
to extend and enhance the behavior of a Dabble application, your code never
actually runs inside Dabble.”

[General]
Name = Amazon Sales Rank

[Sales Rank by ISBN]

URL = http://chadfowler.com/dabble/amazon_sales_rank.cgi
Input = Text
Output = Number

only they have an extra layer for meta data. but that’s a cool pattern.
 “If you’ve used a UNIX-based operating system, you’re probably
familiar with the notion of pipes. The output of one program is
piped into the input of another, creating a filter chain. This is
conceptually the same as the way Dabble’s plugin IO works.
Nice and simple.”

of course, they compare it to pipes. the simplicity. the natural fit of it.
of course, i think they should have web hooks for all their standard CRUD events...
this way their database apps can integrate (like PayPal) with the rest of your workflow
in fact, all these “app platforms” like coghead and salesforce should have web hooks.
that would make them more useful, less silo’d off into just processing data in their world
IMified uses web hooks. sells the tech too: “allows anyone with basic web programming skills
to quickly and easily create ...”
 General Systems
Theory

close by dropping some GST on you

 General Systems
Theory

central tenet is value is not in the elements or parts of a system

 General Systems
Theory

the real value is in the interactions, how they work together.

this creates the emergent phenomenon of a system, and defines its behavior
 Degrees of freedom

increase the ways to work together, the means of combination, increases the DoF
 Increase possibility space

uncover new opportunities in business, tools, and empowerment

 “a new programming paradigm
that takes the whole Internet
as its platform”
this vision for a programming paradigm that IS the internet/web is very compelling... but we’re not
there yet.
 The Programmable Web
APIs and Hooks

the real programmable web will require

 http://flickr.com/photos/nikonfans/439432049/
http://flickr.com/photos/omegaman/477866054/
http://flickr.com/photos/aquan/2780542698/
http://flickr.com/photos/lucky_13/191038503/
http://flickr.com/photos/narwhal85/1290912011/
http://flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/521532598/
http://flickr.com/photos/bendodson/2601002535/
http://flickr.com/photos/ntr23/218966763/
http://flickr.com/photos/shrimphead/2259353414/
http://flickr.com/photos/raphaelmuli/2913907316/
http://flickr.com/photos/x180/467764284/
http://flickr.com/photos/x180/1704475856/

Thanks!
webhooks.org
 “What is the equivalent of the pipe
in the age of the web?”

in 2000, just as rss 0.92 was being released, tim oreilly asks...

since we had nothing better, we assumed the answer was feeds.

this eventually gave us yahoo pipes. which just didn’t seem to change the game like you would think...
perhaps feeds just aren’t the answer. or maybe they are and the problem is using the pipes analogy.
it’s definitely a stretch...