PHP Web Services, 2nd Edition

Chapter 9. Webhooks

Webhooks are becoming an increasingly popular way of enabling other applications to integrate with yours, and they flip the traditional API model on its head. Rather than requesting the data from the API provider at the time that the consumer needs the information, the webhook on the provider notifies consumers when an event of interest occurs. While this is a little more complicated to implement in your application than just offering the ability to fetch data in machine-readable format, it can be an excellent solution for event-driven use cases. It also reduces the load of having many API clients polling a server to check for updates, since the server itself can just send out notifications when relevant events occur.

A good example of when to use a webhook could be when adding new comments to an article or photo. In order to show that comment data elsewhere, another system would need to keep polling for updates; by using a webhook instead, no polling is needed. The second system simply registers an endpoint that the information about a new comment should be sent to. When a comment is made, the first application sends information about the comment to all the other applications that requested to receive it.

The overall idea of webhooks could be respresented along the lines shown in Figure 9-1.

When an event occurs, the server processes the event, and sends information about the event to any third party that has registered an interest in being notified about ...